


Agent Carter and the Left-Hand Man

by onethingconstant



Series: Agent Carter Forever [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America: The First Avenger - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe, captain america: the winter soldier - Fandom
Genre: Angie is a hoot, Bucky needs a hug, Depression, Feels, Gen, Ghosts, Grief, Leviathan - Freeform, Memory Loss, Non-Consensual Kissing, Peggy in trouble, Period-Typical Racism, Spy thriller, Suicidal Ideation, feels everywhere
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-03-29 17:04:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3904099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onethingconstant/pseuds/onethingconstant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Peggy Carter agrees to do another favor for Howard Stark, she doesn't expect to end up shooting a dead man. But the amnesiac James Buchanan Barnes now nursing his wound on her sofa is an enigma she can't ignore. How did he survive his fall? Where has he been for the past two years? Who has manipulated him into working as their agent, and can they be stopped?</p><p>And as Barnes' memories slowly—and disturbingly—begin to return, how long can Peggy hold out before she's forced to tell him what happened to Steve Rogers?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eagle and Unicorn

"I never thought I'd hate the rain," said Peggy Carter to no one in particular.

She hated talking to herself, too, but sometimes it was the only way to have an intelligent conversation. It was becoming more and more of a problem of late.

If she was being honest, it had been a problem for years. Peggy sat motionless in the driver's seat of an old Plymouth coupe—left-hand drive still felt odd to her, like having her shoes on the wrong feet—watching the rain trickle down the windshield. She had always been short of someone to talk to. An only child until she was twelve, she had then acquired a sickly younger brother and a sudden need to be packed off to boarding school. There she had discovered how strange she truly was.

She liked to read, but she also liked a good fistfight. She was talented at art, music, and maths, but she could also spend hours in the woods behind the school, watching birds or tracking badgers, until a worried prefect came calling for her and scared the game away.

She asked questions constantly, about everything. Wouldn't be silent when told. Wouldn't listen to fools, a category that encompassed most girls in her year. There were letters home to her disappointed parents.

It was lucky, she reflected now, that the war had come along when it did. The war, and the Americans.

Peggy had studied mathematics and history at university, with the vague notion of becoming a schoolteacher because it was obvious she wouldn't be marrying anybody. Nobody wanted a fierce, disquietingly intelligent wife. And those had been her options in life until the American Colonel Chester Phillips had come calling on her in the university library.

One of the tutors had recommended her for a position as a computer—one of the clever women who did all the calculations for artillery tables and logistics studies. Phillips had asked a few questions, seemed satisfied with her answers. And then, as he turned to leave, he'd walked behind her and grabbed her arse.

Bloody hell. She wasn't going to start a job with a boss who thought she'd tolerate that. She'd put him on the floor with one punch and coolly told him to put his offers—all of them—where even German intelligence couldn't find them.

He'd laughed. Loudly, heartily, and with joy. And then he'd picked himself up, put his hat back on, and told her she was hired and she'd find out tomorrow what she'd _really_ be doing.

And so she'd joined the Americans' Strategic Scientific Reserve, doing everything the regular military wouldn't or couldn't do to win the war. And she'd _still_ been short of decent conversation until Steve Rogers had shuffled awkwardly into her life, stood at the best attention his ninety-eight-pound frame could manage, and smiled quietly as she decked the first recruit who got fresh.

The only time Steve _hadn't_ fumbled his words to her was when he'd talked about his ideals. About standing up to bullies, doing what was right, protecting the helpless. Grief, too—he was eloquent in mourning. Steve Rogers spoke best when he spoke from the heart. So he rarely spoke any other way.

Peggy would gladly have talked to Steve for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, she'd only had the rest of his.

And so, with the end of the war, she found herself in her lost love's home country, trying to build a life for herself in the place that had shaped him, hoping it would welcome her as he had. So far it wasn't working out. She found herself talking to Steve more and more.

"I used to like the rain," Peggy confided to the imaginary man in her passenger seat. She liked talking to the Steve she remembered best—tall, muscular, broad-chested and bold. She liked recalling the time when his body had finally matched his spirit. "There's no escaping the rain in England, of course. It's everywhere. But it has character, too. Something about London in a flood makes it more London, somehow. The way it routs the sewers, scours the city clean. Here it's just ..." She looked glumly up at the nighttime clouds. "Water falling from the sky."

The imaginary Steve beside her grinned.

"Yes, I suppose it _is_ a shade dramatic," Peggy admitted. "But I've got to inject a little drama, or I'll fall asleep. This is _not_ the proper way to conduct surveillance."

Steve chuckled.

Peggy sighed and went back to watching the warehouse. Watching, and planning what she'd say to Howard Stark when next she saw him. For all that the genius engineer had spent most of the war helping the SSR do dirty deeds in dark places, he seemed ignorant of the basic facts of life in intelligence. Like the number of agents required to maintain surveillance on a large building. He'd requested one. She'd brought two, and it wasn't nearly enough.

The field radio on her dashboard crackled.

"Eagle to Unicorn. Hey, English, you still alive?"

Peggy grimaced and picked up the handset. She hated those codenames. _Eagle_ had been Steve's call sign right through the war, and Angie Martinelli had picked it without knowing its significance. It stung every time she heard it, but telling Angie to stop meant telling her _why_ , and Peggy wasn't ready to have that conversation yet.

"Unicorn to—Eagle," she replied, with only a slight hesitation. "What seems to be the trouble?"

"How d'you powder your nose on stakeout?"

Peggy needed a moment to translate that before she said, "Ideally, you don't."

"English, this Thermos is bigger than my bladder. By a lot. An' the plumbing's off in this place."

Peggy permitted herself a tight smile. Beside her, Steve grinned openly. They'd both endured much harsher conditions in the war, and Angie's discomfort at being set up in a disused office behind the warehouse was unintentionally hilarious.

"Are the fixtures intact?" she asked into the radio.

"They hey what now?" 

Peggy smirked at Steve, then asked, "Is there a toilet?"

"Sure, but it ain't gonna flush without the—oh."

"I won't tell a soul," Peggy promised.

"You're disgusting, you know that, English?"

"Call it Jeffersonian pragmatism." That earned an appreciative chuckle from Steve. He had, in his imaginary way, been helping Peggy with her reading in American history. She was contemplating dual citizenship.

"I don't know what you just said," Angie retorted, "but on this side'a the Atlantic, we got a word for this."

"Hadn't you better go before your back teeth begin floating?" Peggy inquired innocently. The answer was an Italian profanity.

_I like her,_ the imaginary Steve Rogers remarked. _Says what she means, means what she says._

"It's refreshing," Peggy admitted, "until she says what she means about a decent cup of tea."

_Now you're splitting hairs._

"Why does my imagination have to practice intellectual rigor?"

"You say somethin', English?" the radio crackled.

"No. Unicorn out." Peggy switched off the transmitter.

The real problem, of course, was Howard. Ever since he'd recovered his stolen inventions—his alarming "bad babies"—six months before, he'd had a fresh taste for life in espionage. So when he'd heard a rumor about someone trying to steal schematics for a prototype drone plane from a warehouse at his Long Island complex, he had immediately gone to Peggy to set up a sting.

And she hadn't been able to refuse. Howard was a persuasive man, in his way—even if he and Peggy both knew she'd never come anywhere near his bed—and he had an unspoken ace in the hole. Peggy and Angie—the closest thing she had to a friend in this country—were living in one of his lavish apartments. Granted, it was because Peggy's meddling on Howard's behalf had gotten her and Angie evicted from their homes and Angie in trouble with her boss at the Automat, but little things like personal responsibility seldom worried Howard for long. It was important to stay on the good side of her capricious host.

Besides, if Peggy were to be honest, she'd admit Howard had already paid his debt, albeit accidentally. The job of recovering his stolen inventions had netted Peggy a prize—a vial containing what was probably the last remaining sample of Steve's blood. It was priceless. It had probably held the cure for cancer and the common cold, among other virtues. And it had also been the only remaining tangible piece of the first and last man she would ever love.

She'd poured it off the Brooklyn Bridge, into the East River. Let it flow out to sea and circle the globe forever, the way Steve had dreamed of doing once the war was done. Let it find its way to the nameless ice field where his body lay, and tell him everything she'd never been able to put into words.

Peggy would never admit it to Howard, especially since he had no idea where the blood went, but the chance to finally say farewell to Steve had canceled every debt between the two survivors of Project: Rebirth. 

But that left the rent unpaid, and _that_ left her on stakeout. With Angie, who was about as far from a professional spy as it was possible to get.

The _pop_ , when it came, was muffled, barely audible above the hiss of the rain. But the flicker of light in an upper office window was a dead giveaway.

"Holy Hannah," Angie yelped into the radio. "Did you see that?"

"I did," Peggy replied grimly. She'd been sure the warehouse was empty, but it looked like there was at least one person in there.

Two, more likely. _Gunshots are a rare occurrence when one is alone in a room._

"Watch the doors, the windows, and the roof," Peggy ordered. "Whoever it is has got to leave somehow, and the building's on a solid slab."

"Roof!" Angie yelled. "Southwest corner!"

Peggy moved.

They'd talked about this. Angie had sharp eyes and a New Yorker's skill with her elbows, but she was no real fighter. Bringing the prey to ground was Peggy's job.

She saw the shadow move along the roofline a heartbeat before she lunged out of the car. It ran along the edge as she gave chase, heading south.

Then it reached the end of the roof and jumped off.

Peggy gasped and waited for the wet crunch of a body hitting pavement from fifty feet up, but there was only the thud of bootheels, then running footsteps. She was still in shock when the shadow ran out of the alley, right into her field of vision. Instinctively, she snapped her gun up and barked, "Freeze! Federal agent!"

The shadow staggered as if the words had hurt, but kept coming. So she aimed carefully and shot it in the leg.

Peggy prided herself on her marksmanship. As soon as she'd joined the SSR, she'd acquired a pistol and logged every possible second of time on the firing range. She'd only met one person who was more skilled than she was, and he was a specialist with a rifle. So even though SSR protocol insisted that she aim for her target's center of mass, she'd been confident of her ability to hit the thigh. Sure enough, her quarry collapsed, left leg buckling in pain. A skull whacked the pavement loudly enough that she winced, and then there was a groan.

"Don't move," Peggy snapped as she stepped up to the prone, soaking-wet figure of the intruder. She could smell blood, hot and metallic, above the scent of the still-falling rain as she took up another shooting stance, pistol aimed at the man's head. "Who are you?" she demanded. "And who sent you?"

There was just enough glow in the nearest streetlight for Peggy to make out the man's clothing: sturdy boots and a dark jumpsuit like something an auto mechanic would wear. His hair, plastered wet to his skull, was dark. He shook his head as if trying to clear it.

"Owww," he moaned, and touched a gloved hand to his temple. 

"My heart bleeds," Peggy said, acid dripping from every syllable. "Tell me your name, or yours will too."

The man touched fingers to his forehead, then hissed with pain as he struggled to his knees.

"Your _name_ ," Peggy growled.

The man looked up at her, blinking stupidly. There was something familiar in his shadowy face, but now wasn't the time.

"Name!" Peggy barked, regretting that she didn't have a deeper voice. Some people just couldn't take a mezzo-soprano seriously. 

The man worked his mouth for a moment, then stammered, "I—I don't know?"

"Oh, come _on_ ," Peggy groaned. "Put a little effort into lying, at least!"

"Wh—where am I?" The man's voice rose a frightened octave. "What's going on?" He peered at Peggy. "Who're you?"

"I don't think you quite understand how this works," Peggy said dryly. " _I_ ask the questions, and _you_ —"

The flash of lightning cut her off before the thunder could drown her out. She had a sudden, perfect glimpse of the wounded man: kneeling in a puddle, hands on his head, face a dripping model of utter confusion.

But it was a face she recognized.

Colonel Phillips hadn't hired her for her maths ability. Her first day on the job, he'd explained the real reason. The tutor who had recommended her had done so because of a talent she'd always considered more of a party trick than anything else. She'd discovered it as a girl, when she'd lose herself in films at the cinema. She'd been watching a costume drama and happened to recognize an actor who had, she later determined, been in precisely one other American film released in England. It had been a musical, and she'd seen it three years before.

Peggy Carter almost never forgot a face. It was a wonderful gift for a secret agent. And now she recognized the face of the man in front of her—pouting, split lips; deep-set, haunted eyes; even the small, curving scar under his left orbit. She had seen it fresh, when he'd walked into camp half a step behind Steve and gotten everyone cheering for Captain America.

"Good Lord," she blurted, lowering her gun. "Barnes?" 

"Who?" Barnes asked.

Peggy was just wracking her brain for a possible explanation when there was a sudden clatter of high heels on wet pavement and Angie ran up, holding a movie magazine over her head as an improvised umbrella.

"Wow, you got the rat!" she exclaimed, then stopped short. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he's a doll!"

Barnes turned his head slightly to look at her—slim, blonde, shaking with cold and nervous energy—and swayed in place as if he'd been punched. His eyes rolled back in his head, then down again, but he looked unfocused. Peggy glanced at the wound in his thigh. It was bubbling and seeping. She hadn't hit an artery, but Barnes had definitely sprung a serious leak.

"Wh's goin' on?" Barnes mumbled. "Was s'posed to ..." He blinked up at Peggy. "Whr's th' doctor?"

"I beg your pardon?" Peggy asked.

"Doctor." Barnes sagged and put his hand to his temple again. "Need th' doctor." 

"He _is_ hurt bad," Angie observed.

Peggy watched Barnes, momentarily uncertain of her course. She was sure of her identification, even if _he_ wasn't. But it made no sense.

Apart from everything else, Barnes was dead. Steve had said so—had drunk an entire pub because he blamed himself for his friend's demise—and Steve would never have reported a man KIA if there had been a shred of hope he'd survived. But here he was, breathing and mumbling and apparently unaware of his own name or who Peggy was.

And bleeding. Mustn't forget that.

"Angie," Peggy said, quite calmly, "bring the car around." She slipped the keys out of her coat pocket and tossed them. Barnes didn't appear to notice as Angie hurried off and Peggy crouched down in front of him.

"Doctor," he murmured, gazing through her. "Doctor."

"Barnes," Peggy said sharply, wishing she could remember the man's Christian name. Or his nickname—Steve had called him something childish and absurd, and he'd answered best to that. "Sergeant Barnes, look at me."

It was the tone more than anything, but Barnes blinked his slow way back to her.

"Who're you?" he mumbled.

"I'm—" Peggy had a sudden inspiration. "The doctor sent me," she said, as kindly as possible. "I'm to take you to him."

"Oh." Barnes sagged even more.

"Can you stand?" Peggy put a hand on Barnes' left shoulder, then drew back. _Bloody Nora, he's cold!_ "Come on, up you come."

Barnes moaned softly, but he let Peggy pull him to his feet as the car rolled up, engine purring. Angie jumped out and opened the back door.

Peggy reached into her coat pocket again and, moving slowly so she didn't spook her prisoner, drew out a pair of handcuffs.

But to her surprise, Barnes didn't spook, didn't resist. He looked at the cuffs, seemed to recognize them for what they were, and turned slowly around to place his hands behind his back.

"Huh," Angie remarked as Peggy snapped the bracelets shut around Barnes' wrists. "He knows the drill."

"Yes, he does," Peggy replied distractedly.

It took some maneuvering, but they loaded Barnes into the back seat. Peggy slid in beside him, taking a rag from under the driver's seat and pressing it to the wound to slow the bleeding. Barnes didn't react, just slumped against the opposite window, mumbling to himself until his eyes finally closed and he went limp.

"We takin' him to that doctor?" Angie asked as she put the car in gear.

"No," Peggy answered, studying the unconscious man's face. "Take us home. I've a few questions to ask."

"He doesn't seem like the Q&A type, English."

Peggy felt her jaw tighten and her mouth press into a firm line. Her eyes drifted from Barnes' slack face to his gloved hands, just visible behind his back. His hands, and the glint of metal at his left wrist that had nothing to do with handcuffs.

"That's all right," she said. "I won't be asking him."

In the passenger seat of the car, she imagined Steve gazing back at them, his eyes full of confusion and grief.


	2. The Man on the Left

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peggy gets her prisoner home and makes a few discoveries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: This chapter contains brief non-consensual kissing that distresses the non-con participant. It won't be the last case of non-con kissing in this fic, but there will be no non-con sex.
> 
> It also contains a brief reference to Hedy Lamarr, in case anyone wants to make up headcanons about what she and Howard Stark might get up to. :)

“My word,” said Edwin Jarvis, taking off his hat. “Is that fellow dead?”

“He soon will be unless you help,” Peggy replied with a grunt.

“Of course.” Jarvis hurried for one of Howard Stark’s surprisingly complete first-aid kits as Peggy and Angie lugged Barnes over to their sitting-room sofa. He was still unconscious and chilly to the touch, although Peggy had made a point of patting him down and was reasonably sure the cold metal ended at his left shoulder.

“Nice-lookin’ fella,” Angie commented as she helped lower Barnes onto the couch. “Shame he’s a commie or somethin’.” 

“I’m not so sure he is,” Peggy said thoughtfully. “He knew Howard during the war. If he wanted to steal Howard’s design, why not exploit that connection?”

“I give up.” Angie straightened up. “Why didn’t he?”

“Perhaps he’s working for someone who didn’t know about it,” Peggy mused. “And he didn’t volunteer the information.”

“How come?”

“No idea.”

Angie patted Barnes’ cheek affectionately. “He’s a real dish. You got the best luck with fellas.” 

Peggy gave her an arch look. “He’s not my boyfriend, Angie.”

“Not yet he ain’t. But you’d be surprised how far a little Florence Nightingale will get ya.”

“First, he’ll have to survive,” Peggy reminded her.

“I got faith in you, English.” Angie grinned as Jarvis hurried back in with the first-aid kit.

Peggy rolled her eyes, held out a hand to Jarvis, and said, “Scissors.”

It was short work to cut the bloody fabric away from Barnes’ thigh. Everyone agreed that Peggy should be the one to remove the bullet—Jarvis because Peggy was the more seasoned battlefield surgeon, Angie because _you put it in him, you take it out_ —so she did, working quickly and efficiently and trying not to acknowledge the wartime memories flooding through her like a rain-swollen river.

Halfway through the procedure, Angie piped up, “So who is this guy anyway?”

“Is now the best time?” Peggy gritted her teeth. 

“I’m bored. And it’s not like _he’s_ gonna be making witty remarks.”

Peggy sighed. She’d never been much good at having close female friends. Acquaintances were another matter—she’d learned to charm every secretary, telephone operator, and waitress she met, to use their shared experiences of being ignored and discounted to build a network of useful connections. It had been especially easy during the war—girls in uniform bonded as quickly as boys. And no doubt many of those women had considered Peggy a friend. But they weren’t, really. She would always be the one who didn’t fit in.

Angie was different, though. She’d started out as a casual, chatty, coffeehouse friendship, but somehow she’d never let go of Peggy. Perhaps it was because Peggy hadn’t needed Angie for anything. Angie had never possessed strategic or classified information, or useful weapons, or even high-quality gossip. She’d befriended Peggy, helped her, apparently out of sheer liking. Everything in their relationship flowed from the fact that they liked each other, no more and no less. 

Angie could never outlive her usefulness because she was not, in a strategic sense, useful. It was disconcerting, however much Peggy secretly enjoyed it. 

“Oh, all right,” Peggy said.

Angie giggled.

“He was a sergeant with the 107th Infantry,” Peggy began, probing along Barnes’ thigh with her fingers in a search for bullet fragments. “The Howling Commandos.”

“Like, uh—?” Angie didn’t say the name, but she didn’t have to. She knew how Peggy felt about Steve, though she didn’t exactly know _why_. 

“Steve Rogers,” Peggy finished quietly. “Yes.” And just like that, he was there, his ghost crouching beside her. “He was Steve’s closest friend, in fact. They’d known each other since they were boys. That’s largely how I knew him—as Steve’s right hand.” She smiled sadly. “Well, more his _left_ hand.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Angie asked.

“For one thing, he tended to stand on Steve’s left side whenever possible,” Peggy explained as she tweezed out a bullet fragment. Angie held out a bowl—the fruit bowl from the dining table, suddenly devoid of fruit—and Peggy dropped the bloody bit of metal in with a clink. “Steve told me once,” she went on, “that his vision before the serum was better on his right side. He had very little peripheral sight in his left eye. Barnes got into the habit of walking on Steve’s left to protect him from lampposts.” 

“That’s a real pal,” Angie said approvingly.

“It wasn’t just that. Steve was a true idealist, a believer in doing what was right regardless of consequence. Barnes was more practical.” Peggy tweezed out another fragment. “If Steve let an enemy live after he was beaten, and the man raised a hand to Steve afterward, Barnes would put a bullet in the bastard’s brain before anyone else could react. I saw it happen more than once.”

“So he was one of those guys,” Angie said.

“No, he never seemed that way,” Peggy corrected, probing with her fingers. . “He never took joy in killing, and he never seemed particularly afraid. He was just …” She paused for thought. “Have you ever seen a mechanical computer, Angie? A thinking machine?”

“In the movies.”

Peggy sighed inwardly. Curse the Official Secrets Act. This would have been simpler if she could have told Angie what Alan had shown her at Bletchley Park.

“There are theoretical machines,” she said carefully, “that can think, in a very limited way. Mostly they do maths problems. Give them a set of numbers, even a very large or complex set, and they’ll find an infallible solution, every time. They follow their programs perfectly, and they don’t make mistakes.”

“I coulda used one of them in algebra,” Angie said dryly.

“Barnes was like that,” Peggy went on, tweezing another fragment into the bowl. _Plink._ “Not in everything. But in anything to do with Steve in danger. He assessed every situation quickly, and somehow he always knew what to do to keep Steve safe.” She shook her head. “However bloody the solution might be.”

“So he was like a robot?”

“No. Off-duty he drank like a fish and danced with anything in a skirt.” Peggy chuckled. “Once or twice he danced with Steve. But put a gun in his hands and his friend by his side, and he was a different man. Or so I remember, at any rate.” She blushed. “I may have been slightly distracted.”

Angie chuckled. “I bet I know one thing about laughing boy that you don’t.”

“Oh, really? What might that be?”

“He’s awake.”

Peggy looked up with a start. Sure enough, Barnes’ eyes were open, their lids at half-mast, flickers of blue-green irises visible through long, dark lashes. His hands were still cuffed behind his back, but he gave no outward sign of discomfort. In fact, he hadn’t moved at all. He just watched Peggy steadily, as if she were a not-very-interesting baseball game.

“Barnes?” Peggy asked. “Can you understand me?”

Barnes blinked slowly, but made no other response.

Peggy frowned and prodded him experimentally near his wound. His expression didn’t change.

“I’m not sure he _is_ awake,” she mused. “He’s lost a lot of blood, after all. Or he could be faking.”

“I got this,” Angie announced.

Peggy had just enough time to say, “What?” before Angie leaned over Barnes, pressed her mouth against his, and began kissing him.

And kept kissing him.

For quite some time.

Peggy grew more and more embarrassed as she watched, but she was far more impressed. Apparently Angie could hold her breath for an unreasonably long time. Peggy found herself counting seconds. _Eight Piccadilly … nine Piccadilly …_

Around _ten Piccadilly_ Barnes seemed to wake up a little. His eyes opened all the way, and his back arched as he struggled against his cuffs. _That_ was a worrying sign.

“Angie,” Peggy warned.

Angie ignored her.

_Thirteen Piccadilly …_

“Angie!” Peggy snapped.

Barnes whimpered. It wasn’t a happy sound.

_Fifteen Piccadilly …_

“Angie, for God’s sake!”

Angie lifted her head, her lips bee-stung pink where she’d been moving them against Barnes’. “What?” she asked innocently.

Barnes was still lying on the couch with his hands cuffed and Peggy pinning his leg down. His mouth was smeared with Angie’s lipstick, and his eyes were wide with terror as he gasped for air.

And, Peggy couldn’t help noticing, he _still_ hadn’t moved much.

“He’s awake now!” Angie announced proudly.

Barnes was breathing like a faulty engine.

“Yes, well done,” Peggy replied. She prodded Barnes near his wound. This time, he flinched. “Barnes,” she said.

He blinked at her.

“Do you understand me, Barnes? Can you hear me all right?”

He nodded once, slowly.

“Do you recognize me?”

He shrank back, hunching his shoulders, and twitched his head from side to side. Then he winced.

“It’s all right,” Peggy soothed. “You’re safe here. You’ve been injured, Sergeant, and we are removing the bullet. Do you remember being shot?”

He shook his head again.

“How very odd,” Jarvis remarked. 

“Probably the concussion,” Peggy said. “He still looks dazed. Sergeant, can you speak? Say something, please.”

Barnes licked his lips several times before mumbling, “D-doctor.” 

“He keeps sayin’ that,” Angie observed. 

“Do you want us to call a doctor, Barnes?” Peggy asked.

Barnes whined softly and ducked his head.

“I’m gonna take that as a ‘no’,” Angie said.

“Odd indeed,” Jarvis repeated. 

“Not the strangest thing about him.” Peggy reached out a hand toward Jarvis. “Cloth.”

Jarvis handed her a wet hand towel, and she began gently bathing Barnes’ wound. He watched in passive silence. When she was done, he held still as she dressed and bandaged the hole in his leg.

“Tough guy,” Angie remarked. “That looks like it hurts.”

“I’m certain it does,” Peggy answered. “The question is why he’s not reacting.” She sighed. “Among others.”

“Maybe he’s tryin’ to impress you.”

Barnes’ expression hadn’t changed. There was something heartbreaking about seeing him like this. So different from his wartime self.

“What _happened_?” Peggy murmured, peering at Barnes’ blank face. 

“And this is the man who was trying to steal Mr. Stark’s designs?” Jarvis asked. “Or did you just find him at random?”

“He was in the office,” Peggy replied. “There was a gunshot, though, so there might have been another party involved.”

“You didn’t check? That’s unlike you.”

Peggy glanced at Barnes’ face. He had slumped back against the arm of the sofa and was staring, empty-eyed, up at the ceiling. Beside him, the figment of Steve perched on the end of the arm—for such a large man, he’d been very good at moving like his old, smaller self, and seemed puzzled sometimes about why he no longer fit into tight spaces—and gazed down at him, full of worry.

There was no point in explaining to Jarvis the real reason she’d spirited Barnes away from the scene of his crime. No way to explain how deeply and purely Steve had loved his friend, and how anyone who mattered that much to Steve Rogers mattered even more to Peggy Carter. Even Angie didn’t seem to have picked up on it, distracted as she was by Barnes’ pretty face. 

So instead, Peggy said crisply, “I had a suspect bleeding all over my car and very probably Howard’s watchmen en route. I made a command decision. Don’t like it?” She stood up. “Find a new agent.”

On the arm of the sofa, Steve reached down and flicked a finger at an errant lock of hair on Barnes’ forehead. Barnes didn’t blink. For a moment, Peggy wondered if Barnes could see Steve too.

“Where is Howard right now?” Peggy asked as she began gathering the first-aid supplies. She pushed the bloody bullet pieces, still in their fruit bowl, into Jarvis’ hands. 

“California,” Jarvis replied, fumbling to avoid dropping antique china and incriminating evidence. “I understand he has a high-level meeting with Miss Hedy Lamarr.”

“Didn’t he see her last autumn?” Peggy inquired. “I thought Howard never slept with the same starlet twice.”

Jarvis merely shrugged. 

“Call him,” Peggy ordered. “This can’t wait.”

“What shall I tell him?”

“Tell him Peggy says to get his arse on a plane and here within twenty-four hours or he’ll find himself in federal custody shortly thereafter.” 

“Very good.” Jarvis left. 

“You really gonna have our landlord arrested, English?” Angie asked nervously from the other side of the couch. She stroked Barnes’ hair out of his eyes. He blinked only when her hand brushed his eyelashes. Whatever dream world he retreated to, he was clearly back there now.

“Not if he comes,” Peggy told her, still studying her captive. “And it wouldn’t be me arresting him in any case. Howard needs to nip this in the bud before he ends up framed for high treason. Again.” 

“You think he’s being set up?”

“I know no other reason to use this man as an agent.” Peggy rested a hand on Barnes’ shoulder. “He’s not exactly Leviathan material.”

“Lotta guys came back from the war different,” Angie observed. “Maybe he had a change of heart.”

“Not this heart.” Peggy stroked Barnes’ hair with her free hand. 

Barnes shifted in place and moaned.

Peggy paused and frowned down at him.

“I think he likes that,” Angie remarked.

“Yes,” Peggy replied distantly, suddenly caught up in a memory. Steve, still perched on the arm of the couch, was staring at her, eyes the hot, intense blue of an Independence Day sky. Waiting for her to figure it out.

And she did. Peggy had always been quick with puzzles and patterns. And fingers in hair _was_ a pattern, or a piece of one—

_Summer of 1944, some French village whose name she can’t remember. The Howling Commandos are resting up for a few days, awaiting orders, quartered in the bombed-out remains of a small hotel. Peggy’s gotten the message, at last, and gone to find Steve. And find him she does, in a top-floor room dusted with debris, sitting on a bed in his field uniform—for all he complained about the gaudy thing, he never liked taking it off—with his back against a carved headboard and Barnes draped across his lap. Barnes has an arm around Steve’s waist, his head and upper torso resting on Steve’s thighs, and his face buried in Steve’s stomach. His knees are tucked up, curling around Steve’s side, and he looks like he’s tried to glue himself to Steve before passing out with Steve’s fingers—the red gloves are missing, so Steve’s hands are exposed—combing gently through tousled brown hair._

_She sees Steve just as he sees her, and any other man would blush to be found with his friend wrapped around him like a koala, but not Steve Rogers. He might have brought Barnes to an inaccessible part of the building to do … whatever they’re doing … but he seems completely unruffled by the fact that Peggy’s caught him at it. He smiles, raises a finger to his lips, and beckons Peggy in with his free hand._

_She sits down beside him on the bed where she can see Barnes’ face and passes Steve his written orders. Steve reads in silence, still stroking, while Peggy watches Barnes. He’s definitely out cold, and he looks different when he’s asleep. Peggy has always assumed that Barnes’ natural resting face appears to be sucking on a lemon rind, but asleep like this, he looks almost peaceful._

_“Nightmare,” Steve whispers when he catches her looking, and Peggy understands. She’s read Barnes’ file and his terse account of his captivity in Krausberg. The man has a ferocious case of combat stress and should really be sent home, but he refuses to leave Steve’s side and strings have been pulled to keep the two men together and Captain America in the fight. Peggy has wondered how Steve keeps Barnes from shattering._

_Apparently, he does it like this._

_It’s quiet and restful in the little room. Barnes never stirs, and Peggy lets herself sit a while beside Steve, their shoulders touching as they silently watch over the sleeping sniper in the weather-stained blue jacket. At one point, Peggy pets him, too._

_She never tells Colonel Phillips about it. He doesn’t need to know._

Back in the present, Steve was smiling at her—the same sad but eternally hopeful smile he’d given her in that bombed-out hotel room. _Yes, it’s bad_ , that smile said. _But we’re not at the end of the line just yet._

Peggy began combing Barnes’ hair with her fingers, running her nails lightly across his scalp. She ignored Angie’s anxious stirring at what probably looked like an erotic gesture, especially with Barnes moaning and whimpering under her hand. But if she was right, this touch _wasn’t_ erotic to Barnes. Steve hadn’t been holding him and petting him to make him feel aroused. He’d done it so Barnes could sleep.

He’d done it to make Barnes feel safe.

“It’s all right,” Peggy murmured, keeping her movements slow and gentle. “You’re safe, Sergeant. No one here will hurt you. You’re all right now.” His hair felt coarse under her fingers. She wondered how long it had been since he’d washed it, or bathed. In France, his hair had been soft.

Yet again, she wondered what had happened to him since he’d died. 

Slowly, the focus returned to Barnes’ eyes, and after a few minutes he was looking up at her, calm and curious.

“Good evening, Sergeant,” Peggy said with a smile. “Do you understand me now?”

Barnes blinked twice, then nodded slowly without changing expression.

“You’re in New York,” Peggy told him, “at my home.” It felt like an exaggeration, but she didn’t want to explain anything too complicated. “You’re safe here, and I’m going to make sure you remain that way as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. Do you think you can manage to be a good guest?”

Another nod.

“Very good. Then we can remove your handcuffs. Sit up, please.”

Barnes obeyed in silence. Angie gave Peggy the keys, and the cuffs unlocked with a click. Peggy noticed again the glint of metal at Barnes’ left wrist, but kept her suspicions to herself.

Barnes rubbed his right wrist slowly against the leg of his jumpsuit. His left arm hung limp.

“Excellent,” Peggy praised him. “Now, let’s get you taken care of. Are you hurt anywhere other than your leg?”

Barnes gingerly touched the right side of his head with one hand and winced.

Peggy made a sympathetic noise. “We’ll get some aspirin,” she assured him, but privately thought: _Concussion. Must be._

The imaginary Steve was now sitting beside Barnes on the couch, making worried noises like a brooding hen.

Barnes sat quietly while Angie fetched the aspirin and Peggy checked him for a concussion, which he quite obviously had. He swallowed the pills, drank a glass of water, and was sitting with his gloved hands folded in his lap and his head hanging low when Jarvis walked back in, took in the scene, and yelped, “My God, he’s loose!”

Angie jumped. Peggy twitched. Barnes didn’t blink.

“Thank you for the status report, Mister Jarvis,” Peggy snapped. “What word from Howard?”

“He—he—” Jarvis stammered, still staring at Barnes as Peggy guided him gently into reclining on the couch again. “He expects to be touching down at his airfield around seven p.m. tomorrow.” He shrugged. “Today now.”

“Excellent.” Peggy bit her lip. “Angie, how are you with a camera?”

Angie shrugged. “My snapshots mostly come out.”

Peggy favored her with a small smile. “Would you mind going with Mister Jarvis to photograph the office? We’ll need all the evidence we can gather.”

“Miss Carter, my wife—” Jarvis began.

Peggy glared.

He stopped.

“Sure thing, English,” Angie agreed. “But what’re you gonna be doing while I’m bein’ your shutterbug?”

Peggy looked down at Barnes, who was staring up at her like a puppy expecting either a scrap of bacon or a kick in the ribs, but not sure which.

“I’ll be getting the sergeant to talk to me,” she said with a smile. “But I’m fairly certain he’ll be more forthcoming without an audience.”

“Whatever you say.” Angie shrugged again.

Ten minutes later, Peggy was alone with her prisoner. He was still staring at her with more than a little fear. 

“Take it easy,” Peggy advised him. “You’re not going to be hurt. Steve wouldn’t like that. You do remember Steve, don’t you?”

Barnes looked completely blank.

“Bloody hell. All right, then. Are you hungry, Barnes?”

That got a hesitant little nod.

“Well, my cooking won’t win any prizes, but I can produce very edible sandwiches. And I’ll trade them for a favor.”

Barnes cocked his head.

“Take off the top of your jumpsuit. I need to see your left arm.”

Barnes made a soft noise of distress, but his right hand moved to his top button, and he slowly sat up. The shade of Steve Rogers watched him undress.

Peggy had never been the gasping sort. But Steve was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Howard Stark arrives, Peggy does a little digging, and Bucky Barnes starts to talk ... but not the way Peggy expects.


	3. Laws and Sausages

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sergeant Barnes is supposed to be dead. He is not. Peggy Carter is supposed to be a loyal SSR agent. She is not. Daniel Sousa is supposed to be a useful idiot. He is not. 
> 
> Howard Stark is supposed to be a lot of things ...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the delay, darlings. Sousa kicked my ass. No, really. But hey, here's 4000-plus words, including a flashback, for your reading pleasure. 
> 
> A note about the title: it's a reference to a famous epigram (sometimes attributed to Otto von Bismarck, but nobody can seem to find the original): "Lovers of laws and sausages should not watch either being made." 
> 
> It's that kind of chapter.
> 
> [Trigger warnings for this chapter: brief mention of starvation, brief instance of self-induced vomiting]

Sergeant Barnes wasn’t the talking sort. But that was all right. Peggy only needed to look at him to confirm one of her darker suspicions, and then she let him cover up again. He did as he was told.

He _always_ did as he was told.

To a fault, in fact. When Peggy fixed them both sandwiches—peanut butter for Barnes, because she recalled Steve saying the sergeant had a weakness for it—he stared at the plate for two minutes and had progressed to licking his lips furtively before Peggy caught on and told him to eat. Then he bolted his food in less than ten seconds and went back to staring at the floor, the tip of his tongue still darting out occasionally to swipe at his lips.

“Are you still hungry, Barnes?”

Glance up. Hunch. Tiny nod.

Peggy made more sandwiches.

In the end, he ate twelve peanut-butter specials, plus three apples, and drank a quart of milk. He had to be asked or ordered to do all of it, and avoided Peggy’s eyes the whole time.

After that, there wasn’t much to do but keep him calm until Howard arrived. Angie and Jarvis were still out, so Peggy ordered Barnes to get some rest.

Barnes responded by looking around in confusion and rolling up his right sleeve.

Peggy, beginning to catch on and wishing she weren’t, rolled it back down for him. “No,” she told him gently. “No injections. Just lie down and go to sleep, if you can.” She gave him a gentle one-handed push to the chest, and he obediently lay down. “You’re all right,” she soothed, stroking his hair. “You’re safe.”

Barnes closed his eyes on the word _safe_. In a few minutes, his breathing was slow and deep.

Peggy considered taking to her own bed, but finally decided it was too risky to leave Barnes alone. He might be docile at the moment, but there was clearly something wrong with him and it made him unpredictable. She settled into one of Howard’s squashy armchairs—bless the man, he outfitted all his apartments with at least _some_ comfortable furniture—and let herself doze.

An hour later, she woke to the sound of Barnes moaning.

She was disoriented at first, and the muffled noise made her think she was back in Europe, in the field with the 107th. A squad full of former POWs had its share of nightmares; even Steve, who hadn’t been locked up and experimented on by Hydra, had once confided to her that he woke with a head full of bloody images—Barnes lying delirious on Arnim Zola’s table, or trapped in the burning factory, or crumpled on the forest floor with a bullet in a vital spot before anyone could reach him. She’d thought it charming at the time that Steve’s greatest fear was that his friend would come to harm. But it didn’t do much for anyone’s beauty rest. 

“Peg. Help.”

Steve’s voice. She opened her eyes, expecting to see green tent canvas and smell the Black Forest.

Instead, she saw Howard’s glittering chandelier, and groaned. 

“Peggy, please.” Steve spoke above the moaning.

Peggy rolled her head to the side and blinked awake. The ghost of her love was crouching helplessly beside the couch, looking from its occupant to her and back.

Beside him, Barnes was curled up on his left side, knees tucked almost to his chest, face twisted with misery as he whimpered and shook. He mumbled as he twitched, lost in some nightmare world all his own. Steve hovered, looking like his heart was breaking with every whimper. 

“Barnes,” Peggy said sharply, hoping tone would be her ally. “Barnes, wake up.”

No response, beyond more moaning. 

“Sergeant.”

Barnes curled up tighter and whimpered pitifully.

“Sergeant Barnes!”

Steve’s eyes pleaded with her, and he mouthed _Do something_.

Peggy sighed. She was going to regret this, she was certain. But she stood up, walked over to the shuddering man on the sofa, and placed a hand on the top of his head.

He screamed. She jumped back. He began thrashing. 

“Peggy!” Steve yelped at her, and another word followed it, but it was only his lips moving, no sound, and she didn’t get a good look. Flipping hell, why couldn’t she remember what Steve had called him?

Enough. If Barnes kept this up, he’d probably bite his own tongue off, or do himself some other gruesome injury. There was no more time to be gentle.

Peggy lunged forward, grabbed Barnes by both shoulders—the metal one was _still_ cold; what was it _made_ of?—and slammed him into the back of the couch.

With a cry, his eyes snapped open.

“Look at me,” Peggy commanded, and gave him a little shake for emphasis. “Just look at me!”

Whimpering, Barnes complied. His blown pupils contracted, his eyes drifted into focus, and his desperate panting slowed to something almost like breath. He shook his head slightly, and his brow furrowed.

“Peggy?” he asked.

Crouched on the floor, the imaginary Steve Rogers made an excited hissing noise that might have been the end of _yesss_.

Barnes blinked slowly. “Peggy,” he mumbled again. “I mean—I mean, Agent … Agent …”

“Carter,” Peggy supplied, unable to endure the suspense or the confusion in Barnes’ eyes. Odd, that _Peggy_ would be the first name out of his mouth for her. Barnes had never been much of a stickler for military discipline—she was fairly certain he’d never called another commando by rank or surname if a Christian name or embarrassing nickname was available—but he’d always been formal and respectful toward her. _Agent Carter_ or _Agent_ , even as she’d become _Peggy_ to nearly everyone else. Just one of the many quirks of Barnes’ fractured mind that hadn’t made an overwhelming amount of sense. 

And now, suddenly, she was _Peggy_. 

“Agent Carter,” Barnes mumbled, still sounding half-asleep. “Wh—where—?” He gazed dully around. 

“You’re in New York,” Peggy told him. “You’re home, Sergeant. You’re safe.”

Barnes hunched in on himself, and she released his shoulders so he could hug his arms. The metal one whirred. He blinked down at Howard’s sofa—a reasonable reaction, Peggy thought, considering that the red damask upholstery wouldn’t have been out of place in a high-class brothel. The ghost of Steve edged onto the cushions beside him, reaching out tentatively as if trying to rest a hand on his shoulder.

Barnes looked up suddenly and locked eyes with Peggy. “Steve,” he said, his voice unexpectedly clear. “Where’s Steve?”

Peggy felt her breath catch. _Oh, dear Lord. He doesn’t know._

But then, how could he? Barnes had fallen into that ravine before Steve had boarded the _Valkyrie_. Yes, the loss of Captain America had been worldwide news, but Barnes hadn’t even remembered his own name until now. He probably didn’t know the war was over, let alone what the victory had cost. 

Steve looked like he was about to cry.

But Peggy knew she couldn’t tell Barnes the truth. The man had looked at Steve like martyred saints looked at Christ in Renaissance paintings. Fragile as Barnes was, she couldn’t risk breaking him with the news.

“He’s—out,” Peggy hedged. “Back soon. He asked me to look after you while you recovered.”

Barnes gave her a perfectly flat look.

“He’s gonna do something stupid,” he announced.

 _Well_ , Peggy thought, _if he’s going to graduate to fully formed thoughts, it’s probably best he begin with familiar ones._

“I’m sure he is,” she replied, and managed to inject enough world-weariness into the sentence that Steve chuckled and Barnes’ face flickered with a ghostly smile. As if he’d forgotten the emotions behind the expression, but the muscle memory was still there. 

It was all Peggy could do not to break something. She’d never been terribly fond of Barnes, but his cocky smirk had been one for the books.

Everything about this situation was horrid, she decided, and she was definitely going to murder someone for it. The only question was whom.

With some coaxing and the timely aid of a glass of warm milk, she got Barnes settled on the couch again and covered him with a spare blanket. He was asleep in fifteen minutes, and she followed. 

Barnes had two more nightmares before dawn, by Peggy’s reckoning, but both times he settled down, without talking, when she stroked his hair. Thank God for Steve and his unapologetically intimate knowledge of his friend. Peggy tried to imagine how Steve might have learned the trick, but no matter how she tried to envision little-boy Barnes with his head in his mother’s lap, or adolescent Barnes letting a girlfriend pet him calm, no image made sense except for the one she’d actually seen. It was the sort of thing one couldn’t imagine Barnes trusting to anyone else. Steve had been unique. 

Now that was an understatement.

Angie and Jarvis returned shortly before sunrise, and Jarvis busied himself brewing a vat of coffee—thick as tar, what he referred to as the “terrible idea preparation” because it was what Howard drank during frantic all-night bouts of engineering madness. Angie agreed to watch Barnes while Peggy drank the coffee, changed clothes, and prepared for the inevitable next stage in her plan.

She walked into the offices of the Strategic Scientific Reserve at four minutes to nine, started the coffee brewing, and set about committing treason. Again.

Peggy had gotten to know the SSR’s filing system quite intimately during her first few months in New York, and the closed personnel files were a particular specialty. Her fingers could find the R section without any help from her brain, but today she needed the Bs.

Only one _Barnes_ had died in service to the SSR. Small mercies.

Peggy took the file back to her desk and steeled herself before opening it. The photographs were the worst part. Barnes’ official portrait had been taken before he shipped out to Europe. He was smiling, his cap ever so slightly askew, his eyes bright with mischief. Thousands of soldiers had pictures of themselves that looked like this.

But they didn’t have the _second_ photo, the one taken after Barnes had been re-cleared for duty with Chester Philips’ irregulars. Barnes wasn’t posed in this one, no three-quarter turn to his shoulders or cocky tilt to his chin. He held his head a bit lower than strictly necessary, like a wolf protecting its throat. There were deep shadows under his eyes, one edged by a developing scar. And there was no mistaking that thousand-yard stare. They’d backed him up against an ordinary wall to take the photo, but Barnes was staring back at them straight out of hell.

He looked unsettlingly like the creature dozing on Peggy’s couch.

The only detail of the second photo that _wasn’t_ utterly depressing was Barnes’ new uniform. At Steve’s insistence, the Howling Commandos had been allowed to create their own kit, as long as they kept the insignia that made them uniformed soldiers under international law. Most of them hadn’t deviated much from the standard equipment—except for poor Dernier, who hadn’t had a uniform to start with any more than he’d had a free country—but Barnes had ended up with something special. No sooner had Howard announced he’d created a fabric that would stop bayonets than Steve insisted on making Barnes a uniform out of it. Barnes had put his foot down—no stars and stripes for him—but Steve had persuaded him to accept a warm blue double-breasted jacket. _Warm_ had been the word that sold Barnes on it, and everyone had discreetly looked the other way when the jacket had turned up with Steve’s wing insignia on the left sleeve.

Peggy still wasn’t sure who had won the argument between the two men about the jacket, or how they’d come to terms. It didn’t matter anymore. Barnes had walked across Europe in the best protection Steve could give him, emblazoned with a symbol of the bond that had saved his life. Whether it had been Barnes’ tribute to Steve’s idiot bravery or Steve’s way of telling the world to keep its paws off his sergeant, no one could say. 

Peggy shook her head and turned the page. She _knew_ what Barnes looked like. She needed to know how he was still alive. 

_James. That’s right._

The man’s full name was right at the top of the sheet. James Buchanan Barnes. Nothing in his official file about his nickname, but “James” would do. 

His background was sparse. Born in Brooklyn, like Steve, with the standard next-of-kin listing, not updated since the war. That was a thought—perhaps Barnes’ family could stir up memories somehow. Peggy slipped a notepad out of a drawer and jotted down the address. His draft notice and induction records were all dead standard. He’d been almost underweight at induction, but packed on muscle in basic training. That was consistent with Steve’s pitifully undernourished state when Peggy had met him. What little they’d had, they’d shared—

_Winter 1944. Bastogne. The Commandos are walled up in the town, besieged by German Panzers. The history books will talk about the bravery and fortitude of the 101st Airborne, but the 107th Infantry is there too, what’s left of them. And everyone is starving._

_Everyone but Barnes._

_“Gather ’round, boys,” comes the sly whisper, and every head lifts as Barnes saunters into the deserted tavern the Howlers have turned into a temporary headquarters. Peggy is sitting with Steve, poring over maps and intelligence reports in search of a weak spot in the German line, but she sees Steve’s mouth quirk and she knows his mind’s not on the plan anymore, even before he looks up at his friend._

_Barnes unbuttons his jacket slowly, shimmying his hips like a burlesque dancer and running his tongue over his cracked lips. His comrades chuckle appreciatively at the show, and whistle as he draws back first one flap, then the other, to expose his chest. They go silent when they see it._

_There are ropes of sausages draped around Barnes’ torso, over his stained and stinking uniform shirt. God knows where he got them, or what he did to smuggle them back to base, but Peggy sees a glimmer in his hollow eyes that warns her not to ask._

_Barnes passes out the food, doling out portions and growling at anyone who makes too much noise—there’s barely enough for his men, and there’ll be trouble if word gets out to other units. Peggy’s share arrives with a salute and a tiny smirk._

_Steve’s is twice as big as anyone else’s._

_“Hey,” Steve starts, and Barnes casually stuffs a sausage into the super-soldier’s mouth before he can utter another syllable._

_“Shut up, punk. We’re all sick of the zoo in your gut.”_

_It’s true enough. Steve’s metabolism has one great disadvantage—he’s always hungry, always on the hunt for calories to sustain his prodigious biology. For the last two days, Steve’s stomach has been making noises Peggy associates with the lions in Regent’s Park._

_Steve, clearly remembering the better part of valor, starts eating without further complaint. Peggy watches, struck as always by the fact that the serum straightened his teeth._

_But she sneaks a look at Barnes, too. And perhaps it’s a trick of the light, or the fact that he’s bolting his sausages like a dog that expects to see its food dish yanked away at any moment, but he looks … wrong, somehow. Hollow-cheeked, even for a soldier under siege conditions._

_And he doesn’t seem to have quite as much meat as anyone else._

_Peggy says nothing. She’s hungry, too. But she catches Barnes watching Steve out of the corner of one eye, and she could never miss the small, grim nod as he sees Captain America stuffing himself for the first time in days._

Peggy looked at the file and sighed, very quietly.

“Hey. Peggy. I mean, Carter.”

The whisper made her look up.

Daniel Sousa’s desk was only a few feet away, piled high with files and reports—neatly stacked, so there was no chance he’d knock them over when he swung past on the crutch that stood in for his amputated left leg. Sousa, a stocky man with dark hair and the permanent expression of a kicked puppy, was leaning back in his chair, trying to catch Peggy’s eye. When he saw her looking at him, he twitched his head toward the door of Chief Thompson’s office. 

Peggy glanced over just in time to see the door opening and Thompson—tall, blond, film-star handsome and only slightly smarter than a half-brick in a sock—coming out with what looked like a U.S. Army general in tow. Headed her way.

Instantly, Peggy slapped Barnes’ file shut, shoved it under her notepad, snatched the receiver off her desk phone’s cradle, and tucked it between shoulder and ear while scribbling furiously on the pad. She was busily pretending to take notes when Thompson strolled up to her desk, casually dropped a stack of papers on top of her notepad, and walked on.

Peggy looked at the papers and resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Requisition forms. More filing. Somehow Thompson remained convinced that she was the only agent in the office who could be trusted with delicate and highly classified matters of alphabetization.

Sousa was still watching her, and he rolled his eyes sympathetically after Thompson and his general had passed by. Peggy smiled tightly in acknowledgment. 

_Thank you_ , she mouthed.

Sousa nodded, his eyes dark with concern, and mouthed back, _You okay?_

Oh, for God’s sake.

Sousa was both a blessing and a bane. From the day she’d walked into this office, practically no one had taken her seriously. Most of her wartime work was classified, above top secret, which left her without a record and her colleagues with the unfortunate impression that she’d been Captain America’s secretary—or consort, if one were being unkind. Sousa had apparently decided there was more to the story, even if he didn’t get to hear it, and had made Peggy a kind of pet project. Every ounce of humiliation he suffered as a cripple, he poured into trying to make his fellow agents respect the office’s other odd man out. He called Thompson on his rudeness, refused to listen to other agents’ lewd speculations about Peggy’s past, and in general presented himself as her devotedly chivalrous ally.

Unfortunately, this meant that the other agents now assumed Peggy _needed_ Sousa’s protection, further impeding her efforts to establish her competence. And on top of that, Sousa had begun hesitantly inviting Peggy out for drinks. Which she was still avoiding.

And now this.

Bloody hell.

Sousa heaved himself out of his chair and limped over, crutch clicking on the linoleum.

“Rough night?” he asked quietly.

Peggy pushed the file further under Thompson’s pile of busywork. “More of a rough morning,” she murmured.

Sousa nodded. “I’m grabbin’ some joe. You want?”

“Desperately.” Peggy forced a smile as Sousa clicked away to the coffee urn. 

_Bloody hell._

Sousa had caught her with Steve’s file once, and had probably created an elaborate fantasy around the moment. Now he had more fuel for the fire. Poor Peggy Carter, mooning at her desk over pictures of her heroic lost love. _Again._

Still, it was simpler and safer than the truth.

Peggy watched Sousa’s retreating back for a moment. How on earth was she going to stand sitting in an office all day, fetching coffee and collecting lunch orders and bloody _filing_ , when Barnes was sitting quietly on that sofa and very possibly preparing to explode? Even with Angie and Jarvis there, it was ridiculously unsafe. They didn’t know Barnes even in the limited way Peggy did. All they could do was pet his head or shoot him.

And yes, she’d deliberately left the Steve-figment at the flat, watching over the man (because honestly, where else would Steve Rogers be when James Barnes was in pain or distress?), but that didn’t help anyone but her.

Although it did give her an idea. Daniel Sousa had a few qualities in common with Steve Rogers— _just_ a few—and one of them was that he was an astonishingly easy mark.

Peggy used the time while Sousa limped to the coffee urn to compose her face into her best just-smelled-something-dreadful-but-too-English-to-mention-it expression. She let her eyes slip out of focus and thought about the one glimpse she’d had of Arnim Zola during the war, after Steve had captured him the day Barnes was lost. Zola had been led out of an interrogation room, right past Peggy and Steve, and Steve hadn’t been able to keep his devastated grief off his face and Zola had _smiled_ —

That did it. Peggy doubled over and vomited into her steel wastebin. Some things came naturally. 

“Oh, my God!” Coffee cups whacked down on a desk and Sousa clicked and shuffled over to her at top speed. “Carter—Peggy—you okay?”

Bless his soul, the man was an idiot. Peggy sat up and moaned.

“Take it easy,” Sousa murmured, touching his one free hand lightly to her shoulder. He clearly thought better of it a moment later, because he broke the contact and began hovering instead, hand moving around her shoulders and back without ever actually touching.

Peggy resisted the urge to grit her teeth. This was going to set her back, she just knew it. Playing the fragile waif in a room full of men. Heads were already beginning to turn. She could practically feel the tiny shreds of respect she’d worked so hard to earn melting away. She hated this. 

But she was a soldier. Always had been. And soldiers used any weapon they could get their hands on, made any sacrifice necessary to win. Barnes needed her help, and her comrades needed her more than the SSR ever could. 

“What happened?” Sousa asked.

Peggy swallowed her pride—it tasted like bile—and mumbled, “Bad milk, I think.”

“You shouldn’t be here if you’ve got food poisoning,” Sousa insisted. “Go home. I’ll clear it with Thompson.”

It was humiliating to lay it on so thick, but she had a role to play. “Don’t want to leave,” Peggy groaned. “Lot of work to—”

“Forget the filing!” Sousa snapped. “I’m waitin’ on a call, I can take care of it. Go _home_ , Carter. You need somebody to escort you?”

“No.” Peggy gritted her teeth. 

Then Sousa’s hand moved away from her shoulder and came to rest on her desk. On the desk, and on the file folder peeking out from under the stack of papers.

Peggy looked up. Sousa was smiling kindly.

Slowly, silently, he began sliding the file out. Peggy was just getting ready to panic when he glanced down at her purse, tucked out of the way beneath her desk.

“Don’t forget your things,” he said.

Removing classified materials from the office without official permission was a federal offense. Everyone knew that. Peggy could read a little of what was passing through Sousa’s eyes. 

One of these days, Daniel Sousa’s soft heart was going to get him into serious trouble.

But there was no point in stopping him and besides, she really did need the file. Peggy reached down, lifted her purse onto her lap, and opened it. 

“Feel better, okay?” Sousa urged, and the file slid in.

Peggy did her best to look green as she staggered out of the office, casually breaching national security on the way out. She wasn’t sure whether Sousa had assumed she was working another under-the-radar operation or thought Steve’s file would cheer her up, but either way, the man was a public menace.

Angie was sitting in the armchair, watching Barnes sleep, when Peggy came home. She flashed Peggy a grin full of mischief, jerked her head at the prisoner, and mouthed _What a dish_. 

Peggy rolled her eyes, but smiled back. 

Barnes slept all day while Peggy read the file, checked on his wound, chatted to Angie, and got some sleep of her own. It was a waiting game now, and she was good at waiting.

She and Barnes were alone in the living room come evening when the key turned in the lock. She waited until she heard the familiar light footsteps behind her. Howard Stark walked with a permanent swagger.

“Hey, Peg. How’s tricks?”

Peggy didn’t look up. She gazed steadily at Barnes—at the sad softness of his half-open mouth, at the sheen of metal where his left hand clutched at the blankets in his sleep. 

She said, “I saw them all, you know.”

“Uh … come again?”

“Your inventions,” she said. “Your so-called ‘bad babies’. I saw them all in the SSR lab. I photographed them. Do you recall, Howard?”

“Uh.” She heard the rustle as Howard shifted his weight. “Yeah. I remember.”

“All the plans. All the designs. I saw the lot. You told me everything in that vault was too dangerous to be used. Mr. Jarvis told me you’d destroyed it all.”

“I did.”

“You told me once that you lie. Compulsively. Are you lying now?” Peggy set her jaw firmly.

“Peggy. Pal. What’s this about?”

Peggy stood up slowly, walked over to the couch, and gently pried the blanket from Barnes’ fingers.

“Item thirty-four,” she recited. “Autonomous prosthetic limb, powered by an internal reactor and controlled by electrochemical impulses originating in the spinal cord. Abandoned because there was no way to implant and calibrate it without subjecting the patient to lethal levels of excruciating pain.”

She slipped her fingers in between Barnes’. 

His hand curled reflexively, with a whir.

Peggy turned to look Howard Stark in the eye.

“Explain,” she said icily. “And make it good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Four things that need saying: 
> 
> 1\. If you didn't just imagine Sebastian Stan doing a partial striptease in his blue TFA uniform, I don't know what to say to you. 
> 
> 2\. No, the sausage thing was not a foreshadowing of future porn. I just needed a high-protein, shelf-stable food that could be looted from a Belgian village in December 1944. Sausage was pretty much my only option. The siege of Bastogne was real, and really goddamn awful. Finding a bunch of sausages WOULD be cause for both secrecy and celebration. Sometimes, a sausage is just a sausage (and an expression of your undying love for your best friend). 
> 
> 3\. I always say that my stories don't start cooking until my characters do things I didn't tell them to do. Peggy went off-script by talking to Imaginary Steve, for example--that was unplanned. And in this chapter, Sousa turned out to be a bit brighter than anyone gives him credit for. I'm not sure where he's going with it, but I'm interested to find out.
> 
> 4\. I am on Tumblr! I'm onethingconstant there. Please come follow me and be my friend. My Tumblr's about 90% Marvel, 10% other stuff, and links to my chapters as they go up. This account and the Tumblr are part of a sneaky plan to defeat fascism (no, really), and you can help by joining the party.


	4. Little Brooklyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Howard and Peggy have it out, a lie takes shape, Sousa remains a nuisance, Peggy goes to Harlem, Bucky gets some much-needed spoiling, there is a guest star or two, and a red ball becomes an issue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, darlings! It's 50% longer than a typical Agent Carter chapter. I have no idea whether this will become the norm.
> 
> Chapter warning for period-typical racism and oblique references to period-typical racial violence. This includes the use of a certain word that was standard English in the 1940s but is no longer considered polite. 
> 
> I do not speak French, other than a few idioms and some cussin', and I don't know anyone who speaks French that I trust to be better than my high-school Spanish. Every damn French utterance in this chapter came from Google Translate. I'm quite sure some of it's wrong. Feel free to correct me in the comments, French speakers, and I'll update as appropriate.

“Oh, my God,” Howard blurted, staring at Barnes’ exposed hand. Barnes, for his part, went on sleeping, occasionally twitching or grunting as his dreams dictated.

Peggy narrowed her eyes. “Howard, if you try to tell me—”

“Who _is_ that?”

Peggy stopped and blinked. Of all possible reactions—excuses, apologies, blame-shifting—she hadn’t thought Howard would be stupid enough to go for outright denial.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “You know perfectly well who he is!”

“Peg, I meet a lotta people—”

“He _worked_ for you, Howard, don’t you remember?”

“A lotta people work for me!” Howard shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I don’t really pay attention to faces that don’t have lipstick on ’em.” 

Peggy growled under her breath. “You flew fifty miles behind enemy lines so Steve Rogers could rescue him. Fifty miles _through anti-aircraft fire_. Does _that_ ring a bell?”

“Son of a bitch.” Howard rubbed at his face as if trying to wake himself up. “Are you tellin’ me that’s Little Brooklyn?”

“ _Little?_ ” Peggy asked. 

Howard shrugged. “Two of the Howlers were from Brooklyn. Rogers was bigger. Sue me.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “ _That_ was the little guy who followed Steve around like a puppy? The guy who flirted with half the typing pool?” He peered at Barnes, then whipped around to peer at Peggy. “Wait. I thought Little Brooklyn bought the farm.” 

“So did I,” Peggy snarled. “So did Steve. But apparently the reports were exaggerated. And of all the bloody guinea pigs you could’ve chosen—”

“Wait, you think this was me?”

Peggy arched an eyebrow. “It’s unlike you to admit anyone else could have pulled off one of your designs.” 

Howard scowled. “My vault was raided, Peg. There was a working model in there. Anybody could’ve—it could’ve been copied. By Leviathan, even the SSR—”

“Yes, Dottie got the better of you. I recall. That was a year ago, Howard.”

“Exactly my point—”

“His scars are older than that.”

Howard froze in mid-rant. “His—?” He clapped a hand over his mouth. “Oh, God.”

“What?” Peggy demanded. 

“Oh—oh—” Howard’s fingers dug briefly into the flesh around his mouth as if trying to hold back the bile by main force. Then he dropped his head and stared fixedly at Barnes. His face was dead white. “Let me see,” he said.

“He needs the rest,” Peggy said automatically. “Someone tortured him, as I said.”

“I’m not kiddin’ around. I’ve gotta see the—where it’s attached. And the elbow joint. Please.” The last word was uncharacteristically soft.

“Why?” Peggy asked.

Howard worked his jaw miserably. “There’s a lot you don’t know about this, Peg. I’m not callin’ you stupid or anything, but there’s maybe three guys on this side of Winnie’s Iron Curtain who’d know what to look for, and maybe two across it. I can’t just take your word.”

Peggy glared for a long moment. Howard was a liar and a manipulator, as well she knew. He would say practically anything to get out of trouble or get what he wanted. Someone had clearly performed unspeakable acts on Barnes, and all the evidence pointed to Howard. Even though she’d caught Barnes breaking into Howard’s office, that didn’t make the inventor innocent—it was always possible that Barnes had broken free and tried to avenge himself, or that some erstwhile ally of Howard’s had turned the puppet against Geppetto. If Howard was behind the ghastly experiment that had left Barnes in his current state, then letting Howard near the prisoner would be like letting Josef Mengele treat Auschwitz survivors. 

But if Howard _was_ innocent, he probably _could_ find clues in the design of the arm. Clues Peggy herself had missed.

Damn it. Why did the horrid man have to be so bloody useful?

Grudgingly, Peggy stepped aside. “If you harm him,” she growled, “you’ll find out what the Commandos did in Poland. The files they wouldn’t let you read.”

Howard blanched even more.

Peggy turned to the sofa and gently edged the imaginary Steve Rogers aside. He seemed to prefer hovering near Barnes’ head, making the worried faces he’d always seemed to reserve for the damaged sniper. But his singleminded concern was beginning to get in the way.

Peggy wondered occasionally what the presence of the figment implied about her sanity. Whether it meant she would never be able to let go of Steve in any but the most wrenchingly literal sense. She’d finally decided that it wasn’t simply her own grief at work. She missed Steve like she’d miss an amputated limb— _poor taste, Carter_ —but the world needed him even more than she did. The world needed Steve Rogers, or someone very much like him. And if the best it could do was the pale shadow he’d left in her mind and heart, well, it would muddle through somehow. And she would do her bit.

She stroked Barnes’ hair, exactly as Steve would have done.

“James,” she called softly. “Wake up, please.”

Barnes whimpered, then flinched away and opened his eyes. 

“Peggy?” he croaked. “Is Steve back?”

Peggy ignored the sharp hiss of breath from Howard. “No, not yet, I’m afraid,” she told Barnes, and tried not to let her heart sink at the way the man’s entire body sagged under her words. “But someone else is here to see you,” she added. “You remember Howard Stark, don’t you?” She moved aside just enough that Barnes could finally see Howard, and held her breath.

Barnes blinked owlishly.

And that was apparently all they were going to get. Peggy let the silence stretch out for several seconds, in case Barnes was going to suddenly remember Howard torturing him. But there was nothing.

Finally, Barnes squinted and asked, “Didn’t you make a car—?” He made a wobbly motion in midair with his metal hand, then thumped it down on the blanket over his stomach. 

Howard rolled his eyes. “Everyone’s a critic.”

Barnes smiled, small and wicked. It was the most life he’d shown since Peggy had shot him.

“James,” Peggy said, keeping her voice carefully even, “Howard needs to see your new arm.”

Barnes grunted irritably, shrugged off the blanket, and began unbuttoning his coverall. He muttered something under his breath as the garment opened, exposing an oddly hairless chest for an adult man.

“Now, isn’t _that_ interesting?” Howard murmured, leaning in. Barnes stared right through him, holding unnaturally still for the exam.

“What did you say, just now?” Peggy asked her nominal prisoner.

“I said—” Barnes snorted as Howard poked his metal elbow. “I said normally when a dame wants me to take my clothes off, it’s a lot more fun.”

Peggy arched an eyebrow.

Barnes, to his credit, blushed. “That’d be why I didn’t say it out loud,” he explained.

“Hmm.” Peggy pursed her lips. “You seem considerably more coherent this evening than last.”

“Think the stuff they gave me’s wearing off,” Barnes replied. His eyes were still glassy and he seemed to be having some difficulty focusing, but his face was considerably more animated and he seemed, in all … more Barnes-like, she supposed. More like the man she remembered. 

The Steve-figment eased onto the couch beside him, almost close enough to touch, his lips moving soundlessly.

Peggy shook her head. “Do you happen to know what that _stuff_ was?” she asked Barnes. “Or who _they_ might be?”

Barnes shook his head slowly. His shoulders didn’t move at all, though a metal plate on his left bicep suddenly snapped shut, perilously close to Howard’s fingers. Howard swore.

“I was doped all the time,” Barnes said dully. “Don’t even know what day it is.” He blinked in sudden realization. “Hey! I don’t know what _month_ it is!” He whipped his head around frantically, scanning his environment. “How’d I—where—?”

“Breathe,” Peggy snapped. “You’re all right.” 

“Unless you keep moving,” Howard put in. He’d produced a metal probe from somewhere, like a dentist’s pick, and was working it between the plates on Barnes’ shoulder, midway between the hideous scarring and the bizarre Soviet star.

“Where’s Steve?” Barnes demanded, his voice rising a panicked octave. “How long was I gone? What happened to him?”

“For God’s sake—” Howard began. 

“ _Shut up, Howard!_ ” Peggy snarled.

Everyone fell silent, except for the rasp of Barnes’ frightened breathing.

“Barnes,” Peggy said, pitching her voice low and steady. She stepped forward and rested her hand on his head.

Barnes made a small sound, almost a whimper, deep in his throat. Beside him, the Steve-figment draped an intangible arm around him and murmured silent comfort into his right ear. Barnes didn’t react. 

“Barnes,” Peggy repeated. “You’re in New York. You are home. You’re safe. No one is going to hurt you.”

“But,” Barnes mumbled. “Steve.”

“Steve is—” Peggy hesitated, then looked at the figment, silently asking his permission. Asking Steve Rogers for leave to lie to his brave, fragile best friend. She could feel Howard holding his breath.

The imaginary Captain America looked from Bucky to her, his eyes inexpressibly sad, and nodded. 

“Steve’s on a mission,” Peggy said kindly. “But he’s aware of your situation and he’ll—he’ll be back soon.” Silently, she wondered how long it would take a few drops of blood to flow around the world and back to the East River. And then, because it was slightly more true than any other half-truth: “He’s not in any danger. He’s just been delayed.”

“By ice,” Howard put in, and ignored Peggy’s glare.

“How long?” Barnes asked meekly.

“How long until he returns? I’m not quite—”

“No,” Barnes interrupted, his voice soft. “Me.”

Peggy took a deep breath. “Today is Wednesday, December fourth, 1946. Or,” she glanced at the clock on the mantel, “I suppose it’s Thursday the fifth now. You were reported missing in action about two years ago.” 

Barnes looked like he’d been punched in the gut.

“The war ended more than a year ago,” Peggy continued. “Er, we won, in part because of what you and Steve did.” Not that the outcome had been in doubt in late ’44, when Barnes was lost—except for the ever-present possibility that Hydra would pull a history-changing superweapon out of thin air.

“My men?”

Peggy couldn’t suppress the smile there. _Ever the sergeant._ Barnes might have spent most of the war a walking poster for combat stress, but he’d taken care of the soldiers in his charge. More than Steve had, actually. Steve had made sure the Howlers got food and rest, but Barnes had fought tooth and nail for dry socks, reliable weapons, and mail call at every opportunity. Steve had inspired them; Barnes, in the unforgiving way of sergeants everywhere, had loved them.

“Not a single troop lost,” Peggy told him, and saw a little of the tension bleed out of him. 

“Steve.” Barnes clearly had a one-track mind. “How’s he been holdin’ up?”

“Better than expected,” Peggy hedged, trying to feel her way through the minefield of a relationship she’d never begun to understand. “He tore apart Hydra after you went missing. Schmidt is dead.”

Barnes smiled at that, and for a moment Peggy was back in a London pub, watching out of the corner of her eye as Barnes finally saw what was growing between her and Steve. Something he couldn’t flirt or charm his way out of. He’d smiled then, too, with the same agony in the twist of his lips.

 _He thinks I’m gonna ditch him_ , Steve had told her one night before the Commandos shipped out. _I dunno why._

Peggy had known that much, at least. She’d felt the same way when Steve had stepped out of that chamber, sweaty and stunning and no longer the stammering asthmatic only Peggy was cunning enough to notice.

 _He thinks you no longer need him_ , she’d replied.

 _He’s an idiot_ , Steve had shot back.

Peggy wouldn’t argue, then or now. Barnes had always been a fool for Steve Rogers. It was a feeling she knew well. 

“He missed you,” she told Barnes. “Every second.”

“Hmph.” But something about Barnes’ expression thawed at the words.

“Speaking of unplanned absences,” Howard put in, “what can you tell us about yours? Where were you? Who’s been keeping you all this time?”

Barnes shook his head and gestured vaguely at his temple with his right hand. “Still pretty much mush. Sorry. Think they spoke German. Or Russian. Maybe both? But I dunno where. Some cell, someplace cold. They made me sleep a lot. Coulda been Moscow, coulda been Jersey.” He wrinkled his nose. “It _smelled_ like Jersey.”

“What does New Jersey smell like?” Peggy asked, curious.

Howard and Barnes gave her identical flat looks.

“You’ve been there,” Howard reminded her. 

“Yes, but it smelled like America.”

Identical eyerolls. Peggy suppressed a smirk.

“You can go back to sleep now, Barnes,” Peggy said dryly, “unless Howard needs you.”

“No, I’m done,” Howard grunted, standing up. “And I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.” 

“What is it?” Peggy replied.

“I’ve got a leak. Or, more accurately, I _had_ one over a year ago.” Howard folded up his toolkit and slipped it back into his jacket. “This is my design, but it’s got a few extra modifications I never made, and a few redundancies I eventually worked out. The shoulder joint’s on the primitive side, and some of the plate work is gonna jam too easily. But that’s not the whole problem.”

Peggy rolled her eyes. Barnes blinked solemnly. 

“He’s got the older joints, but these neural relays—hey, Little Brooklyn, wiggle your fingers—”

Barnes obeyed, with a whir. 

“That right there? That’s a piece of tech I developed _after_ Ida had her little shopping spree in my vault. Somebody was working from my design, but they updated it with stuff that only existed for maybe a month before I had everything destroyed.”

“What does that mean?” 

Howard shook his head. “I don’t know. And right there are my three least favorite words in the English language.”

“Thought for sure it’d be ‘out of scotch’,” Barnes mumbled. “Or maybe ‘that’s my wife’.”

“Remind me again why I flew through flak for you?” Howard retorted. “I got some aircraft-aluminum shrapnel in a very personal place that I can invite you to kiss at any time.” 

Barnes smiled, still vague but looking better by the moment. Beside him, the Steve-figment chuckled fondly. 

“Get some rest,” Peggy told him. “Howard and I can track down a leak. We don’t need you for that, and it’s more important that you get well.”

Barnes nodded and lay down again. Peggy couldn’t resist smoothing his hair as he burrowed into the cushions. He went momentarily rigid, then relaxed with a little sigh.

Peggy caught Howard’s eye and jerked her head toward the hallway. It was hardly conducive to private conversation, but it was better than disturbing Barnes’ rest, and it was the nearest quiet space that wasn’t a bedroom. Howard was Howard, after all, and much as Peggy avoided thinking about it, she knew exactly how the bedrooms in the flat had been used before her arrival. They were undoubtedly equipped with thick walls and sound baffling, but she wasn’t about to step into one with him.

“So,” Peggy murmured as she closed the door, “who had access to the designs?” 

Howard grimaced. “It’s a short list, at least. The stuff never left my lab between the last revision and the day I locked it up. It was in the vault maybe a week, presumably undisturbed, before I sent everything to be destroyed. So me, Jarvis, a couple of guys in my lab, and the disposal team. That’s it.”

“No … visitors?” Peggy inquired.

Howard reddened. “Not at the office. I’m trying not to mix business with pleasure after … y’know …”

“A Soviet agent nearly manipulated you into murdering thousands of innocent people?”

“Yeah. That.”

If Peggy had been in a more forgiving mood, she might have commended Howard for the effort. But the scars on Barnes’ chest and the grief in Steve’s eyes filled her with so much rage that there was no room for mercy.

Someone was going to burn. The only question was who.

“I’ll start with the disposal team,” she decided. “Put your suspect employees under surveillance. Look for sudden changes in behavior.”

“You got it.” Howard nodded tightly. “Anything else you need?”

Peggy set her jaw. “Not at present. But when I find your leak, you’ll hear from me.” She looked him in the eye. “I imagine there will be remains.”

Howard glanced at the door to the room where Barnes lay, wrapped in unhappy dreams. 

“Not for long,” was all he said.

*

Peggy called in sick again the next morning. To her surprise, Rose transferred the call not to Thompson, but to Sousa.

“Hey, Carter,” he said softly as soon as the line clicked through.

“I’m _so_ sorry, Daniel,” Peggy began in her sickest voice.

“You don’t have to do that,” Sousa interrupted. “Just give it to me straight—whatever’s going on, is it going to put any agents in danger?”

Peggy winced. The death of Agent Krzeminski was still raw for everyone in the SSR. 

“I don’t think so,” she murmured.

“How ’bout the public?”

That took more thought. She still didn’t know what Barnes’ captors had wanted him to do, whether it was simple industrial espionage or releasing nerve gas in the subway.

“I don’t have any reason to believe so,” she said carefully. “But there’s no telling for certain. It’s early days.”

“I’m in,” he replied. 

“Daniel—”

“Two heads are better’n one,” he pointed out. “And I’m not exactly filled with joy at the prospect of you flying solo. You got a helluva hook.”

Peggy grimaced. 

“Go do whatever,” Sousa told her. “I’ll be in touch. We just caught a red ball you’ll wanna hear about.” 

“I can’t ask you—”

“Who’s asking?”

She hung up on him. There was a tone in his voice that reminded her uncomfortably of Steve.

The disposal company Howard had used operated out of a third-floor walkup office in Harlem. An odd choice for someone of Howard Stark’s means, Peggy thought as she began climbing the stairs. Surely there were a hundred firms with more resources and better security, to say nothing of more inviting office space. She’d never even heard of this place.

Peggy couldn’t deny feeling the tiniest bit vulnerable as she climbed. Not because it was a heavily Negro neighborhood, particularly—rather, because she felt alone without her imaginary companion. Her brain and heart refused to duplicate him, and there was no way Steve Rogers would leave James Barnes’ side while he was in pain.

Too bad, really. Barnes, the Barnes she and Steve had both known, would probably have insisted on coming along, regardless of the color of the faces on the street—

_“Agent Carter! Agent Carter, wait up!”_

_She doesn’t immediately recognize the voice, especially not shouting like that, but she turns on her bootheel, mud be damned, and sees Sergeant Barnes pelting up to her across the airfield. He’s in his proper uniform for once, through his jacket is mussed, his tie is a disgrace, and his forelock is spilling over his left eye in a manner she’d call rakish if the eye itself weren’t so haunted._

_It’s not from running, though. The man’s scarcely even winded by what must have been a long sprint across the tarmac. How did he even spot her at her distance from the barracks?_

_“Agent Carter,” Barnes stammers, “I—we—Steve—Captain Rogers needs a—your help.” Sweat glistens on his face, but his breathing is slow and regular._

_Peggy cocks an eyebrow. “And he sent you, did he?” As if Steve would ever pass up an opportunity to talk to her. Peggy isn’t particularly proud or certain she has what her mother would call_ charm _, but she can read Steve like a cheap paperback with very few words. But it’s best to hum or Barnes, she supposes. “What seems to be the trouble?”_

_“You gotta talk to Colonel Phillips,” Barnes tells her. “He told us—I mean, he told—”_

_“Captain Rogers,” Peggy supplies impatiently. Honestly, it’s as if Barnes doesn’t know how to apply singular pronouns to his own boon companion._

_Barnes shakes his head in obvious frustration and finally snarls, “He’s gonna take Jonesy!”_

_Peggy frowns. “I beg your pardon?”_

_“Jones!” Barnes snaps. “Gabe Jones! Private! From Georgia, about so tall?” He gestures several inches above his hair. “Phillips said he’s gonna send ’im to a Negro unit, and w—_ Steve _needs you to stop him!”_

_Peggy’s frown deepens. “Wouldn’t Jones be better off in a Negro unit?” she asks carefully. She’s never subscribed to American racial segregation, but she once had the misfortune of overhearing a group of airmen from Mississippi. Accounts of lynchings seemed less far-fetched now, and she’s noticed Jones keeping very much to himself. Among other things, he never goes to the pub without Jacques Dernier, and never drinks more than one beer, no matter how long the evening goes on._

_Barnes stares at her like she’s sprouted an extra head. “Better off how?” he asks._

_Peggy feels her face getting hot. “Well, he’d be among friends—”_

_“He ain’t got any.” Barnes looks terribly sad. “The 92nd—Hydra took ’em apart. All the guys he served with are gone. And those Negro units, the shit details they get—” He shakes his head. “Steve_ needs _him. He’ll do more good with us.”_

_“Steve needs him?” Peggy echoes skeptically. “For what?”_

_“Translating for Frenchie,” Barnes says. “Dernier. Best guy with a detonator, but his English is—”_

_“Falsworth speaks French and so do I,” Peggy cuts him off. “Try again.”_

_“He speaks German, too,” Barnes continues doggedly. “And we_ need _a radio man—”_

 _“There are white radio operators.” Peggy is intrigued. What_ is _Barnes after?_

_“He’s the size of a goddamn ox an’ twice as strong—”_

_“Running out of excuses rather quickly, are we?”_

_“_ I promised! _”_

_Peggy blinks in surprise. Barnes’ shoulders are heaving, his face is twisted, and his composure is shattered. He looks ready to explode._

_She’s only heard him raise his voice the once._ Let’s hear it for Captain America! _he shouted. Not like this, raw and vicious._

_Peggy tilts her head to one side and regards Barnes critically. “What did you promise?” she asks._

_Barnes is shuddering with every breath, shaking his head and fighting to keep his voice level. “Krausberg,” he spits. “The factory. They killed the Negroes first, most of ’em—typical Nazi master-race shit. Fewer mouths to feed, before the work started killin’ us. But Jones, he got put in a cage with me and Dugan and the others, and we’d hide him, y’know? Put our jackets over him at night so the guards wouldn’t see we had a Negro in there. And I promised him—I mighta been runnin’ a fever, but I swore on my mother that I’d get him outta there. That I wouldn’t let anybody lay a hand on him. His sarge was dead, and I told him, I said, ‘_ I’m _your sarge now. Anybody wants to take you, he’s gotta go through me.’” He pales visibly. “And that’s what they did, eventually. They went through me.”_

_Peggy gazes at him for a moment. She’s not sure she’s heard Barnes speak more than ten words at a stretch before._

_“It sounds to me,” she says carefully, “as if the debt is paid.”_

_“It’s not a debt, Agent, it’s—he’s one of my guys. I don’t care what color he is. He’s good, and he’s one of us, and he told Steve he was in.” He smiles wanly. “So he’s crazy, too, and we need crazy.”_

_Peggy regards him for a few seconds, then returns the smile. “I’ll have a word with the colonel,” she promises. “I believe he still owes me a favor.”_

_“Yeah?” Barnes’ face lights up. “What’d you do?”_

_Peggy flashes a wicked grin. “I let him have his cigars back after the last time he felt the need for poker. He really ought to know better than to believe an Englishwoman can’t bluff.”_

_Barnes’ laughter follows her all the way to Phillips’ office. It’s a lovely sound, not least because she’s never heard it before._

Peggy shook her head, Barnes’ staccato laugh still ringing in her ears as she mounted the stairs. Soon, she promised herself, she’d find a way to make him laugh again.

The third door from the landing had a hand-painted sign reading _Marseilles Disposal_. She knocked.

“Coming, coming!” called a voice in an unmistakable French accent, and Peggy had just enough time to hide the surprise on her face before the door opened and she was face-to-face with a tiny, mustachioed Frenchman she had last seen roaring drunk in London on V-E Day.

His eyes widened comically as they met hers.

“Agent Carter?” he gasped, and then there was a flood of excited French, peppered with _mon commandant_ and _ça fait longtemps_ and _vous êtes encore plus belle_ and a lot of ridiculous flattery that Peggy immediately quit translating in self-defense. One didn’t need to speak French to understand Jacques Dernier. His face was all the Berlitz anyone could ever require. 

“Monsieur Dernier,” Peggy said warmly, and then she was being escorted into a cramped office, kissed on both cheeks, and offered every possible kind of drink—

“Enough!” a second voice boomed from an adjoining room. “You trying to say hello or smother her?”

Peggy didn’t bother concealing her delight as Gabe Jones sauntered in, holding out a hand for Peggy to shake and immediately pulling her into an enveloping hug. 

“Agent Carter,” he said as he drew back. He was wearing a sharp gray suit, in stark contrast to Dernier’s shirtsleeves and suspenders. “Been too long.”

“It has indeed,” Peggy admitted. “I had no idea you two troublemakers were in New York—I thought you’d both gone home after demobbing.” 

Jones shrugged. “Found work here.” He jerked his head at Dernier. “ _Somebody_ had to help Monsieur Le Fou over here set up his business.” His eyes glittered with mischief. 

Dernier threw a string of gleeful insults at him.

“Seriously, it’s been an adventure,” Jones continued blithely. “Turns out you can charge double with a French name on whatever you’re selling, and word gets around fast when you’re looking for demolition and there’s a couple of Howling Commandos in the business.”

Peggy laughed, but eyed Jones critically. “How has your family taken the change?” She vividly remembered Jones telling stories about his pack of rascal brothers and sisters, to say nothing of—by all accounts—the sweetest, sternest mother on the planet. All of whom presumably still lived in Georgia. 

Jones gave her a flat look that said he saw right through her. “They hate it,” he said calmly. “But they’re makin’ it work.”

Peggy knew she’d got about as much of the story as Jones was going to give her, but to her surprise, Dernier stepped in.

From the corner, leaning against the wall, he spoke a few sharp, quiet sentences in French.

Jones glared at him.

Dernier lifted his head, and said a little more in defiance.

“ _C’est assez_ ,” Jones said softly.

“I think,” Peggy interrupted, “I understand.” And she did. She still didn’t fully comprehend what Jones’ life was like, but Dernier had been run out of Marseilles by the Nazis. He of all people understood exile, and he of all people would stand with Gabe Jones, even if it meant crossing an ocean for the privilege.

“There’s gonna be some changes,” Jones said. “Here’s as good a place to start as any. And we figured somebody’s gotta pick up the slack. Cap and Bucky would approve, I guess.”

 _Bucky_ , Peggy thought. That was Barnes’ name.

“This is their home,” she told Gabe. “So yes. Starting here sounds perfect. And if there’s anything I can do—” She walked over to a desk, snatched up a pen, and jotted her telephone number on a piece of foolscap. “I can be reached here.”

“Gonna be dangerous,” Jones replied. “Especially for a—”

Peggy gave him a look.

Jones grinned. “That’s what I thought.”

“I missed you, too,” Peggy told him. “Now. I realize my errand is rapidly becoming irrelevant, but indulge me—did you boys do a job for Howard Stark last spring, by any chance?”

Dernier beamed.

“We did,” Jones said. “What’s this about?”

“Howard’s got another leak,” she explained. “I’m helping run down all the possibilities. I don’t doubt you two _thoroughly_ destroyed _whatever_ he gave you—”

Dernier giggled. It was what Peggy had come to think of as his Comp B noise.

“But,” she continued, “I’ll need to go over your records and disposal protocols, just in case.”

“Sure thing,” Jones agreed. “I’ll pull the file.”

It didn’t take long to see everything was airtight. Hardly a surprise, Peggy thought; the Howling Commandos were nothing if not thorough when it came to explosions. In less than an hour, she was satisfied.

Only Jones and Dernier had handled the materials once Howard delivered them. There were no loopholes. 

“Sorry we couldn’t be more help,” Jones remarked.

“I didn’t want it to be you lads anyway,” Peggy replied.

“Still.”

They parted with another round of embraces. At the door, Peggy paused and looked back.

“I wonder,” she murmured. Then: “Did either of you ever visit—?”

She didn’t need to finish. Both men shook their heads.

“No place to go,” Jones said. “Not like they had graves. I hear they’re talkin’ about a statue or something.”

Dernier said something rude, and made a spitting noise.

“Man’s got a point,” Jones agreed. “Who the hell wants to see that? Statue of a stupid costume. Probably won’t even have his name on it, let alone Bucky’s.” He gave Peggy a sad, grim smile. “Better to remember ’em like they were, right?”

“ _Souvenir que les hommes_ ,” Dernier said, “ _non pas comme des histoires_.” 

“Quite so,” said Peggy softly, and left.

She went back to the flat, where she found Angie coaxing Barnes into eating more sandwiches. He went still as Peggy walked in, then relaxed when he got a good look at her, and took another bite. Ham and Swiss, from the look of it. At least he was getting protein. She wondered how he’d be about vegetables.

“How are we this afternoon?” Peggy inquired, slipping out of her coat. 

“Steve?” Barnes—Bucky—replied. 

“Not yet.”

He nodded and pushed the remainder of the sandwich into his mouth.

“He eats like my cousin Joey,” Angie said approvingly. “And an entire chorus line to boot.”

“I’ll inform the chef.” Peggy smiled. “He’ll enjoy the challenge. Bar—er, Bucky—”

His head snapped up, eyes suddenly bright.

Peggy paused. “Bucky,” she repeated. “Would you rather we called you that?”

He nodded, and shivered. “That’s—that’s me. Right? That’s what Steve calls me.”

 _Brave smile. Don’t let him see._ “Yes. Yes, he does.”

“I—I want to be Bucky.” It sounded like _I want to go home_. 

“Then that,” Peggy informed him, “is precisely who you’ll be.”

That was how she discovered Steve wasn’t the only one with a smile like sunlight.

The afternoon passed slowly, and revolved around Bucky. Once the sandwiches ran out, Angie talked him into taking a bath— _he’s getting a little ripe, ain’t he, English?_ —although he nervously declined her half-joking offer of company. The hot water seemed to relax him more, and it wasn’t hard to talk him into giving up his soiled and stinking coverall for a pair of Jarvis’s trousers—Howard’s were far too small to accommodate Barnes’ larger build—and one of Howard’s bigger dressing gowns. Peggy made a mental note to do some shopping at the first opportunity.

Between Peggy’s assurances that the flat was totally secure and Angie’s unflagging willingness to spoil him, Bucky needed very little encouragement to stretch out on the tiger-skin rug in front of the fire as the two of them took turns reading aloud from whatever books struck Angie’s fancy. She started with Jane Austen novels, then switched to Byron and Keats— _I’ve always wanted to have a handsome man read me poetry_ —and then, as Bucky’s expression improved, Shakespeare. After that, Angie got the bright idea of having Bucky help her run lines for an upcoming audition, and Peggy was treated to the sight of a Brooklyn-born amnesiac with a high-school education wrestling with Chekhov. 

The doorbell rang at six, and Bucky was on his feet in less than half a second, in a fighting crouch between Angie and the hall door.

“Angie,” Peggy said calmly, “would you mind taking the sergeant with you into one of the guest rooms while I see who it is?” She glanced at Bucky, saw the fear and protective impulse warring in his eyes, and added, “Best not to show our hand just yet. You’ll hear this,” she drew her pistol from a pocket and ignored Angie’s wide eyes, “if I need backup.”

Silently, they slipped into the back corridor, toward the guest bedrooms. Peggy went to answer the bell.

Sousa had a fine dusting of snow on his hat, just beginning to glisten with melt.

“Sorry to intrude,” he said.

“I’m more curious about how you got the address,” Peggy answered.

“Told Stark’s butler it was an emergency. Figured he’d know where you were after—you know.”

“He’s really not suited to espionage. Very well—what is it?”

“Red ball.” Sousa pulled a folder out of his coat and handed it over as he swung inside on his crutch. “Two stiffs found on the Long Island waterfront. ID’d as Russians, which naturally made me think of Leviathan. But there’s a twist.”

Peggy flipped open the folder. Photographs. She grimaced.

“Shot in the head, execution style,” Sousa continued. “But near as the ME can figure, the carving happened while they were still alive.”

Carving indeed. Both men were sprawled supine, their chests bloody with a series of deep cuts. Precise, geometric cuts, with a very clear pattern.

“So this case you’re not working,” Sousa said. “Might it have anything to do with red stars?”

Peggy took a deep breath. “I’m afraid it’s a message,” she said. “Probably intended for me.”

“Feel like sharing?”

Peggy stared at the photos, burning the details into her memory. “I may have liberated one of their prisoners,” she said. “And it appears they want him back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those wondering:
> 
> 1\. The American armed forces were not desegregated until after World War II, and White soldiers being comfortable around Black GIs was strange enough that my grandfather, a WWII vet and career officer, was startled and proud to discover his son happily playing with Black soldiers' children on the bases where he grew up in the 1950s. I have deliberately given Bucky an unusual attitude toward Gabe Jones, predicated entirely on the fact that he bonded with Gabe in Krausberg and Gabe volunteered to back Steve up. I see Bucky as a pragmatic guy who doesn't friggin' care what color you are if you're crazy enough to help him keep Steve alive. But it's an uncommon attitude for the time, and he expects people to give him crap for it.
> 
> 2\. Yes, I am implying that Gabe got involved in civil-rights activities in the South immediately after returning, and was run out of Georgia for it. Gabe is well-known in the comics as a figure in the civil-rights movement (and half of the first interracial romance I know of in Marvel Comics), so I decided to start that here. Dernier is here because France was well-known in the prewar U.S. as a place where attitudes toward Black people were more liberal (whether that was quite accurate or not). It is also my headcanon that Dernier got into a bit of trouble right after the war ended (I am still deciding WHY he punched Charles de Gaulle, but I'm pretty sure he did) and needed to get out of town himself.
> 
> 3\. No, it's not anachronistic to have Bucky be relatively comfortable with Austen, Byron, Keats and Shakespeare. A high-school education in the 1930s would have included a lot of material students now don't encounter until college. Between that and my headcanon that Steve and Bucky read to each other a LOT during Steve's illnesses, James Buchanan Barnes might be blue-collar, but he's well-read. Bucky's education is roughly modeled on that of my grandmother, who never got past high school but who kept many of her schoolbooks into her old age. What I saw on her shelves, I assume Bucky studied. That wouldn't include Chekhov; he and other modern authors didn't become popular in high-school curricula until after the war.
> 
> Join me next time for flashbacks, field trips, government paperwork, Hershey bars, and Peggy meeting new people and shooting them.
> 
> As always, I would love to see you on Tumblr, where I am onethingconstant. Follow me for fic stuff, Bucky and Peggy awesomeness, and opportunities to ruin a fascist's day just by being there.


	5. Some Harveys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky and Peggy figure out what Leviathan's been up to. Harveys, pancakes, and five pounds of Hershey bars ensue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry, m'dears. Real life has been no fun whatsoever. I haven't abandoned this story, I swear, and there's more goodness coming soon. Until then, have yet another longer-than-the-last-one chapter.

"I remember," Bucky said quietly.

He'd swapped his jumpsuit for some of Howard's clothes, and so he stood barefoot, in trousers two inches too short for him, his hands sunk in his pockets and his chin sunk on his chest. He worked his mouth anxiously, as if fighting the urge to chew his lip.

"What do you recall?" Peggy asked, spreading the photos across Howard's coffee table.

"That guy." Bucky pointed at one of the corpses. "Smoked crappy cigarettes. You could smell it on his breath, always." His face turned stony. "He liked to hurt people. And he liked to watch people get hurt."

The first question Peggy thought of was _How did he hurt you?_ But that would only make Bucky defensive. If Steve was any guide, Bucky would rather die than admit weakness.

Instead, she asked, "What did you see?"

This time Bucky did bite his lower lip, then shook his head in disgust. "He carried a knife, always," he said. "Cut up a couple of prisoners. Liked ears." He nodded at the photograph. "Probably his knife that did that. How's that for irony?"

Peggy waited. 

Bucky grimaced, turned away, spun back again, and shoved his flesh fingers distractedly through his hair. As always, the touch seemed to calm him slightly, and he took a shaky breath. 

And he said: "He gave me the knife once."

His eyes flicked up to her, waiting for her judgment. Peggy had noticed the way Bucky's eyes seemed to change color according to time of day, lighting, even his mood. Right now they were silver-blue, and very pale. She kept her expression neutral, and said nothing. 

Finally, Bucky looked away. "They'd given me a shot. I don't know what. He put the knife in my hand, told me what to do. I used to work in a butcher shop, did Steve ever tell you?"

"He said you had a lot of jobs."

"Kept his stupid ass in old stew meat for a whole winter." Bucky smiled a little. "I was—I was good at it." His smile vanished. "Still am, as it turns out."

"It wasn't your fault," Peggy said. "These people—Leviathan—they specialize in turning people against themselves. They'll stop at nothing to get their way. You're not to blame, whatever happened."

"You don't _know_ what happened," Bucky said quietly. "Hell, _I_ don't know what happened. It's all in pieces, like a nightmare." The plates on his left arm shifted with a nervous series of clicks. "I can't tell if I'm awake right now. How crazy is that?"

"You're awake," Peggy assured him. "You're alive, you're home, you're safe, and—"

"An' Steve'll be back soon, yeah, I got it." Bucky looked away. 

Peggy hesitated. She hadn't intended to mention Steve, actually. No sense digging her grave even deeper by giving Bucky false hope. But that wasn't the problem at hand. 

The problem was that he could see when a man was spiraling. And Bucky Barnes would shatter on impact if she didn't pull him out of his spin. 

Steve's ghost was lingering by the window, glowing faintly. She glanced at him for strength, clasped her hands behind her back, and stood at parade rest. Here went nothing.

"Sergeant Barnes," she said sharply. 

Bucky jerked to attention as if someone had attached a wire to his spine. He gazed at her, wide-eyed. 

"Report," Peggy snapped. 

He didn't react at first. Then his ghost-smile crept across his face, the one she was learning to recognize as his real one, and he saluted smartly. His voice was soft when he said, "Yes, ma'am."

"Leave nothing out," Peggy ordered. "The smallest detail may be critical." 

Bucky's smile quirked up on one side. "Do as Peggy says, huh?"

Peggy nodded. 

"Yes'm." He slipped into parade rest, fixed his eyes on a vague point in the middle distance, and began speaking. His voice was calm, almost gentle. 

"On an expedition in the Alps sometime in December 1944, I became separated from my unit, a detachment of the 107th Infantry under Captain Steven Rogers. I fell from a moving train into a ravine under," his mouth twitched, "adverse weather conditions. I didn't expect any search to be mounted."

The sentence was like a punch to the chest for Peggy. That was Bucky Barnes all over. He'd tear the world apart for Steve, but he always seemed faintly incredulous when anyone gave him similar consideration. 

"To my surprise," Bucky continued, "I was found by members of the Red Army." He shot Peggy a bashful look. "I was kinda glad, truth be told. I was in a lot of pain, 'cause I'd just about pulverized my left arm bouncing off some rocks, and I think I was in and out of consciousness because something was chewing on it, but I only saw it once. Do they have bears in the Alps?"

"Did you see a bear?" Peggy replied.

Bucky cocked his head. "I remember a bear, yeah. But my memory's not so hot these days." He gave himself a shake. "Anyway, the Reds found me, and they seemed to know who I was. One of 'em kept running his hand over my jacket, and another guy pulled out my dogtags and they got real excited. I figured, great, I'm saved." He rolled his eyes. "Saved by the Russians. I'm an idiot." 

"It's all right," Peggy assured him, a lot more kindly than was customary for her. Bucky looked like he was about to fall apart in front of her. 

"The arm—it—I think it took several surgeries. I don't remember a lot. I guess that's what the drugs were for. They used a lot of drugs, I think. I slept so much I didn't know what day it was, what time of year. I thought I was in a hospital at first, gonna be sent home. I didn't figure it out until I woke up one day to a guy takin' a tape measure to my chest and," he tilted his head to indicate his left shoulder, "the stump. I made some dumb joke about how he was measuring me for a coffin, and he actually smiled. Guy spoke a little English, so I asked what he _was_ measuring me for, and he said—" He blinked rapidly. "He—he said—"

"Breathe," Peggy ordered. 

Bucky sucked in a deep, grateful breath. "He said it was for my _new_ arm. I thought he meant a hook or something, like they gave guys after the last war, so I said, y'know, don't bother, Uncle Sam'll fix me up, just send me home. I said my sisters, they'll be worrying." He swallowed hard. "And he just— _looked_ at me. And kept measuring."

"And that's when you knew," Peggy said.

"That's when I knew, yeah. I wasn't up to moving around yet—I was real sick for maybe a week after they found me, threw up everything—and by the time I could sit up without help, they were keeping me in cuffs and shackles." He rolled up his right shirtsleeve and held his forearm out for Peggy to see. Sure enough, there was faint scarring on his wrist. 

Not as deep as Dottie's, not as noticeable. But the resonance was undeniable.

"Did you ever hear the name Leviathan?" she asked. 

He nodded shakily. "Yeah. They mostly spoke Russian, you know, but I knew that word. Didn't sound Russian, and I kept thinking I'd heard it before."

"Possibly in church," Peggy told him. "Leviathan's a sea monster mentioned in the Bible. In the book of Job." 

Bucky's ghost-smile made a fleeting appearance. "Becca," he said quietly. 

"Pardon?"

"My sister, Becca," he explained. "Kid's got a helluva memory. She went through a coupla months where she tried to memorize the whole Bible 'cause Sister Maggie said she couldn't." 

Peggy cocked an eyebrow. "Your sister tried to memorize the _whole book_?"

"All or nothing, she said. Used to walk around the house reciting." Bucky ducked his head. "I guess it stuck."

Peggy made a mental note to track down Becca Barnes and make sure the girl wasn't plotting the overthrow of the free world. But later. "Leviathan," she said, changing the subject back, "is also the name of a Russian deep-science organization. Intelligence, too. They're a bit like Hydra."

Bucky went still.

"And it seems they engineered your arm, using a design stolen from Howard Stark. A design, I hasten to add, that he never put into production because the surgery to implant it—"

"They cut my brain."

Peggy's stomach twisted. "Yes. We're not sure how you survived that, let alone recovered as well as you have."

Bucky's face turned to stone. "No."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'm not answering that. I don't have to, and I'm not gonna." 

"Bucky," Peggy began, hoping his nickname would soften him up. 

"I said _no_ , Carter. And don't try gettin' Steve's puppy eyes in here to change my mind." He wrapped his arms protectively around himself, and the shadows under his eyes deepened. "You want that, you're gonna have to torture it outta me, and you're a lot of things, but I don't think you're up to that. You're too good." 

Peggy was touched. Bucky Barnes, former POW and torture survivor twice over, thought she was too good to do any torturing herself. He was wrong, of course—she didn't _like_ using pain as a lever, but she was far from squeamish—but from a man with Bucky's dark view of reality, it was quite the compliment. Possibly the nicest thing anyone had said about her in a while. 

"All right," Peggy said after an awkward moment. "Leviathan implanted your arm, never mind how or why. Then what?"

"Then ..." Bucky scowled and shook his head. "Then it's a blur. A _nasty_ blur. I remember a lot of waking up, then getting a needle in my arm or my neck. And there's a few pieces. That guy with the knife. Another time, they gave me a gun, put me on a firing range. I ... I never even thought of shooting 'em." He closed his eyes. "I hope that was the drugs. Otherwise I'm crazy."

"Leviathan is good at manipulating people," Peggy assured him. "They've turned little girls into killing machines. I fought one in Russia. She killed an American soldier, and she was about twelve."

Bucky looked ill. "That wasn't all they did."

Peggy waited.

"A couple times, I think, they strapped me down, gave me a shot so's I couldn't move. They put this thing—like an ice pick, kinda, but smaller—and they stuck it up my nose, or into my eye, and—" He stopped, shaking. His eyes opened, but they were blank.

"Sit down," Peggy ordered. Bucky obeyed, still staring straight ahead. 

She threw a blanket around his trembling shoulders and went to make him a cup of tea. He hadn't moved when she came back, so she talked him through drinking it and lying down on the sofa. After a few minutes of her fingers in his hair, he seemed to drift into a more natural sleep. 

Peggy bedded down in the sitting room with him, in case he woke up frightened or disoriented. Her last thought before going to sleep was that she'd have to guard Bucky's blood as carefully as she'd done Steve's. Apparently the things the man could recover from included not only a fall from a great height and experimental brain surgery, but more than one standard lobotomy. 

The fact that he'd been lobotomized _multiple times_ didn't bear much thinking about. 

Morning came far too soon. Peggy dragged herself into the kitchen to find Angie in her dressing gown, making the messiest pancakes in the history of humanity. 

"I think the point is to keep the batter in contact with the pan," Peggy yawned, putting the kettle on the hob. 

"Shut up, English," Angie replied cheerily, and jerked her head at a large plate, piled high with irregularly shaped and slightly scorched flapjacks. "You mind delivering?"

"Not at all." Peggy picked up a pancake with her fingers, rolled it expertly, and pushed it into her mouth. 

"Pegs!" Angie looked scandalized. "Those're for Bucky!" 

"Should've labeled, then." Peggy took a second pancake, just for spite, and wolfed it. 

Angie waved her spatula menacingly. "Maybe you ain't been paying attention, but the poor guy eats like an armored division. Quit hoggin' the rations!"

Peggy reached for a third helping, then paused. "Angie."

"Yeah?"

"Are you afraid of him? Is this some kind of appeasement?"

Angie's face clouded over dangerously, and for a moment Peggy thought she was in for a trademark Angie Martinelli monologue. But then the thunderheads vanished, abruptly as they'd come. 

"Not _him_ ," she said quietly. "We used to get guys like him at the Automat, y'know. The quiet ones, not like that jerk you forked." 

Peggy grinned. She'd told Angie about that, eventually. 

"But the other ones," Angie continued. "Guys with empty sleeves, or just kinda that _look_ in their eyes, y'know? Like—you ever see _Harvey_? That play about the invisible rabbit that follows the crazy guy around, and only he can see it?"

Peggy shook her head. 

"Well, it's like that. It's like there's something following those guys, and it's invisible to everybody but them. And what are you gonna say to that, right? 'Hey, tell me about your invisible rabbit'?" She snorted. "And some Harveys are kinda nice, don't get me wrong. I had a guy come in first of the month, every month. Coffee and a piece of cherry pie, and he'd tell me about this guy who saved his life on D-Day and bought it a week later. The guy wouldn't shut up about his mama's cherry pie, so his buddy would stop in every month or so to grab a slice to remember him by." She smiled sadly. "But most of the Harveys are real monsters. And there's nothin' you can do but be nice to the guy who's got one. So no, I'm not scared of your pal in there. Just his Harvey." 

Peggy pursed her lips thoughtfully. 

Angie gave her a dirty look. "What?"

"Nothing," Peggy murmured. She leaned companionably against Angie and bumped her shoulder. "I just wish I'd had you around during the war." 

Angie blushed. "Go make your tea."

"Ma'am, yes, ma'am," Peggy intoned, and went to do just that.

She took the tea and the pancakes out to the living room. Bucky hadn't moved from the couch, but his eyes were pen and his face was a picture of misery. She set the pancakes on the coffee table in front of him, made sure his eyes had focused on them, and returned to the kitchen. 

"Darling," she drawled to Angie as she strolled in, "your country needs you to do your part." She plucked the spatula out of the slighter woman's hand. "He's too glum to eat pancakes. I prescribe an immediate morale boost." 

Angie grinned wickedly and left. 

A moment later, there was a muffled yelp, followed by a softer, more satisfied noise. Peggy grinned to herself and began flipping pancakes. 

Bucky wasn't smiling when she carried the last of the food into the room, but he was blinking and looking around and eating, which Peggy counted as a victory. Angie was draped sideways over an armchair, reading a script and looking pleased with herself. Bucky sneaked a glance at her over his coffee cup. 

"Sergeant Barnes," Peggy said smoothly, setting down the pancakes and settling into her own chair with her tea, "are you up for an expedition today? I thought we might try to reconstruct your last assignment, perhaps find out what Leviathan was after." 

"Okay," Bucky said quietly. 

"Splendid." Peggy took a sip of her tea. "I do hope we have some clothes that fit you. Can't let a war hero walk around in short trousers." 

That earned her a tiny smile.

Jarvis's wardrobe came to the rescue again; there was a smaller selection available in the servants' quarters, but the butler was tall enough that his trousers could be turned up and Bucky was trim enough in the waist to make it work. Trimmer than he'd been during the war, in fact—even at Bastogne, if Peggy's spatial memory was any good. Leviathan really hadn't been feeding their experiment properly. 

Perhaps he ate like Steve now, she thought. He might have to enter government service just to keep himself in groceries. She recalled Steve's stories of Bucky working all manner of odd jobs, but none had sounded like a promising way to maintain a man who ate for four.

Howard's car came to pick them up at eight, but to Peggy's surprise, Howard wasn't in it. Neither was Jarvis.

"Good morning," said the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman at the wheel. She had an accent that reminded Peggy of Bela Lugosi. 

Peggy stepped protectively in front of Bucky.

The woman looked sad. "We haven't met," she explained, "but I'm—"

The penny dropped, belatedly. "Anna," Peggy said. "Mrs. Jarvis." Of course. Jarvis had _said_ his wife was from Budapest. "What are you doing here? Where's your husband?"

"Edwin is, ah, detained," Anna said. "There is a woman—Miss, ah, Turner? Very pretty, and she does not leave. Edwin helps."

Peggy took a moment to parse that. "Your husband is evicting Lana Turner from one of Howard's residences?" 

Anna's face lit up. "Yes! And I have the car."

Peggy nodded briskly. "Well. Good to know we're keeping everything in the family. Can you drive us to Long Island?"

"Of course."

They made the trip in silence. Anna was as smooth and skillful a driver as her husband, and seemed utterly unbothered by the man with the metal arm staring out the back window. She tuned the radio to Artie Shaw's orchestra, and hummed along. 

It was a long way to Long Island, but Bucky didn't speak once on the trip. He scanned the horizon, the surrounding traffic, the rooflines of buildings and the cables of the Queensboro Bridge. Peggy wondered what he was looking for. Did Leviathan have more rooftop-jumping agents like him?

Perhaps it wasn't a good idea to ask at the moment. She wasn't certain of Bucky's mental state, but surely he'd say something if they were in actual danger. The man had a sense of self-preservation, after all. 

Well, probably. He _had_ willingly chosen to spend most of his early life following Steve Rogers around. 

Peggy's identification got them past the gate of the Stark compound, and Anna pulled the car smoothly up to where Peggy had been parked. The pavement still smelled of the recent rain as they climbed out of the car. 

"Report," Peggy ordered. 

Bucky's spine straightened. "They had a truck," he said. "Delivery van, I guess. Drove in during business hours, dropped me off and left. I was supposed to wait until the place was deserted, get the files, and then rendezvous."

"What files?"

"I had numbers." He rattled them off, his voice utterly flat. Peggy scribbled them down in a notebook to check later. They sounded like patent numbers. Probably inventions. 

Howard and his bloody inventions. She'd say Howard's inventions were more trouble than they were worth, except that technically one of his inventions had been Steve.

The ghost stood at Bucky's shoulder, his blue eyes flicking over the surrounding buildings. Keeping watch. 

"Where was the rendezvous point?"

"Warehouse in Queens. They'll have cleared out by now." He recited the address, which Peggy dutifully wrote down.

"I heard a gunshot inside the office," Peggy remarked. "What happened?"

"I." Bucky frowned. "I—I think—" He trailed off, his forehead knotting in frustration. 

"Take your time," Peggy murmured. After all, any corpse he'd left in the office would have been discovered some time ago. 

"I thought I saw someone," Bucky said at last, in a very small voice. "It was reflex."

"Someone else was there?"

"No. Nobody."

"How can you be sure?"

Bucky shook his head. 

Peggy had a sudden inkling. "Anna," she said calmly, "would you mind waiting with the car for the next several minutes?"

"Not at all," Anna said, with a kind smile at Bucky, and retired.

Bucky waited until the driver's door had slammed before he hissed, " _Steve_."

"You thought you saw Steve?" Peggy demanded.

A twitchy nod. "Yeah. I—I think I see him a lot. Side effect of the drugs, maybe? I dunno. But he wasn't there. You said—he's not here."

Peggy glanced at the ghost. "No. I'm afraid not. But at least there was no harm done."

Bucky shivered.

The rest of the reconstruction provided no new information. An hour later, they were back on the road to the city. Peggy insisted they stop at a drugstore. 

"Whatever for?" Anna asked.

"I need to use the telephone."

"There are telephones at the apartment—"

"This won't wait," Peggy snapped.

Anna dutifully pulled them over. Peggy opened the door before the car had come to a complete stop, provoking a scoffing noise from Anna and a throaty sound from Bucky. 

She marched straight to the back of the shop and jammed a nickel into the phone. 

"Sousa."

"Daniel, it's me. I need to know—"

"Holy hell." Sousa's voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. "You wouldn't believe what's been goin' on around here, Peggy."

"What?"

"Thompson's been in meetings all day. Top brass. And there's about a hundred requisition and transport forms piling up on your desk. I been trying to make a dent—you're welcome, by the way."

Peggy frowned. That was more paperwork than she typically saw in a week. "Any idea why the sudden burst of activity?"

"Need-to-know only," Sousa said dryly. Peggy rolled her eyes; she knew what that meant. "But between you and me, it's something to do with that red ball. I saw 'em goin' over the photos on Thompson's desk. They're moving something around now that those stiffs turned up."

Behind Peggy, the soda jerk turned up the radio. 

"Hey," Sousa said, "are you in public?"

"Yes," Peggy said. "I'm running down leads. Don't worry; this location was chosen at random." _And hasn't been bugged by anyone who might be monitoring Howard._

"Swell. Pick me up a sandwich, willya?"

"Do I look like the lunch lady?" But there was mirth in Peggy's voice. Sousa was one of the few SSR agents who would never confuse her with the secretarial staff. Clocking a man in front of him would do that. 

"You be careful out there," Sousa said softly. "These guys, they don't play so nice."

"I appreciate the concern," Peggy replied. "But neither do I."

"Ten-four."

She hung up and dialed another number.

"Marseilles Disposal." 

"Gabe, it's me—"

"Hey, we were just about to call you."

Peggy blinked. Was she really in so much demand today. "What's happened?"

"We checked the lists again. You know, 'cause it's you. And yeah, like we figured, everything we got, we destroyed. But we didn't get everything."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The inventory," Gabe said. "Howard gave us a couple hundred things to get rid of, but there were maybe a dozen items already crossed off his list. He just told us not to worry about 'em." 

"So those items were diverted," Peggy guessed.

"That's my theory. Jacques has his money on stolen. _Again._ "

"I'm sure Howard would have called me in on that," Peggy replied. "More likely the SSR lost them." _Or "lost" them. Or simply refused to release them back to Howard at all._

"You're the expert. You wanna come up here and look at the list?"

Peggy glanced at the door. "It's a lovely day for a drive. I might even have a surprise for you."

It was another silent ride to Harlem. Peggy spent it wondering how she was going to reintroduce Bucky to his former comrades without giving someone a heart attack—or inconveniently revealing why Steve wouldn't be coming home. She opened her mouth half a dozen times, about to explain, but something in Bucky's faraway expression stopped her. 

_Leave him be_ , she decided. _Give him a few more minutes without his grief._

At last, though, the car pulled up, and Peggy laid a hand on Bucky's shoulder. He flinched out of his reverie.

"We're here," she said, ignoring the way he was fighting to bring his quick, shallow breathing under control. "There are people you'll want to meet. Come on."

"Do I have to?"

Bucky was staring into his lap. His hands were curled there, one flesh and one metal. 

Peggy started to say _Of course you're coming, don't be ridiculous_ , but the memory of Bucky's empty eyes and quiet obedience after his capture stopped her cold. This wasn't a man she wanted to give orders to.

"It's all right," she coaxed. "It's a couple of the Commandos. Jones and Dernier—you remember them, don't you?"

Bucky shivered. "Yeah. Do I have to?"

"I—suppose not. Do you not want to see your comrades?"

"Not like this, I don't." Bucky was still avoiding eye contact. "Maybe when—you know."

 _When Steve gets back._ The words hung between them like a lead weight on a string. From the front seat, the Steve-figment cast sympathetic looks from Bucky to Peggy and back. 

After a pause that went on entirely too long, Peggy said, "I'll just be a moment."

She got the list in record time, and said she had to dash because she had a cab waiting downstairs. By the time she was climbing back into the car, she had formulated a plan. 

She gave Anna an address in Brooklyn, one she'd looked up and memorized shortly after moving to the city but had never actually gotten up the courage to visit herself. 

This time, Bucky was glancing shyly up through his eyelashes as Anna cut the engine. 

"Do you want to go inside?" Peggy asked. 

He nodded. 

Lieber's Candy Shop had struggled to survive wartime sugar rationing, but survive it had, and now the windows were full of colorful sweets: licorice and lemon drops and lollipops the size of a child's face. Peggy led the way inside, Bucky shuffling awkwardly behind her and casting furtive glances all around. Anna brought up the rear, studying the shop with undisguised interest. 

Peggy shot Bucky a smile, as if to say _Pick out whatever you like._

It was a cheap ploy and she knew it. Steve had told her plenty of stories on long nights during the war, and more than a few of them had involved his sergeant's sweet tooth. According to Steve, Bucky had thought he'd had the elderly Mr. Lieber fooled, pocketing a few little things on every visit: jellybeans and salt-water taffy and—his favorites—little bits of black licorice shaped like lozenges or Scottish terriers. Sweeter than anything else, Steve had sworn, and so tough that Bucky could, with care, suck and chew on them for nearly an hour. 

Of course, a Brooklyn shopkeeper wouldn't last long if he couldn't spot ragged little boys pinching candy in the middle of the Depression. The only reason Bucky had thought he'd gotten away with it, in fact, was that Mr. Lieber ran any thieves he caught out of the store on the first offense, told their parents on the second, and banned them forever on the third, but Bucky had never gotten so much as a harsh word. So a worried young Steve Rogers, when first confronted with the black-tongued evidence of his friend's thievery, had hurried to the store in an attempt to pay his friend's debt before they both lost their sugar privileges for all time. 

At which point Mr. Lieber had let him in on a little secret. Peggy smiled to herself, remembering Steve's creaky-voiced impression of the crotchety old man. 

_That boy watches out for the whole damn neighborhood, kiddo. You just shut your mouth and let us watch out for him, hey? A little mensch like Bucky is worth a few dried-out Scotties._

The ghost of Steve Rogers lingered near a tub of chewy black Falas. 

In the end, an uncharacteristically shy Bucky selected a plain hunk of pure chocolate from a glass case. He watched reverently, never taking his eyes off it as the clerk—who was _not_ Mr. Lieber, far too young, but now wasn't the time to ask questions—wrapped it in wax paper, slipped it into a small bag, and handed it over. Peggy watched Bucky cradling his chocolate in his gloved hands as she paid for Anna's selection (a handful of colorfully striped candy sticks, including two peppermint canes) and her own (the Scotties, both in case she needed a bribe later and because Steve's recommendation counted for a lot).

She saw Bucky glance nervously around, then lift the packet of chocolate to his face and sniff deeply, eyes closing in ecstasy.

_There aren't many sweet shops left in London, not in 1944. Between German bombs, food shortages, and the evacuation of hordes of children, there's not much of a market for candies._

_So at first, no one remarks on it when Sergeant Barnes develops a passion for poker and begins fleecing his fellow GIs of their Hershey bars. And certainly no one blames him when he forgoes the bitter, nasty D rations, designed to serve as meal substitutes, for the commercial chocolate sent in Red Cross packages and passed out as a morale boost. Other soldiers play cards with him willingly, game to risk (and usually lose) their chocolate for the chance to hear Barnes' steady patter of jokes and wild stories as he deals a hand. And sometimes he's gotten his paws on a bottle, too—whiskey is his beverage of choice—and he's willing to share that as well, in exchange for more strangely tangy American sweets._

_Peggy herself doesn't think much of it until she sees him hurrying down a corridor in the bunker one night, carrying a small satchel bulging with familiar rectangles._

_She follows him, partly for the practice and partly because Steve will have a fit if his friend gorges on that much chocolate and spends the next twenty-four hours vomiting. Barnes is usually a sensible man, but he's been developing some strange habits of late. Eating five pounds of Hershey bars would be a new one, and she doesn't want to find out the hard way that it's been added to his repertoire._

_Barnes takes a zigzag path through the corridors before hightailing it up a back staircase and out onto the empty London streets. He doesn't look around as much as he should._

_Peggy follows him for over a mile, until she sees him slip into the bombed-out, boarded-up remains of a church. Getting in there unobserved is tricky, but so is she._

_Barnes is sitting in the front pew, head bowed, when she spots him again. He's hunched low in his overcoat against the night chill, and his hands are stuffed into his armpits. He always seems to be cold these days, when he thinks no one's looking._

_She's just about to step out of the shadows when she sees one move._

_It detaches from a pile of rubble and resolves itself into a little girl, no more than eight years old, with dark hair and pale eyes and a hungry look on her dirt-smeared face. She runs across the nave to where Barnes is waiting. His head snaps up at the sound of her footsteps, and he's already reaching into his bag before she reaches him. She stops, just out of arm's reach, and then darts in to take the proffered chocolate bar._

_The two of them talk in low voices as the girl nibbles on her treat. Barnes never takes his eyes off the child; he gazes at her like she's the most important thing in his universe. For a wild moment, Peggy wonders if the girl is somehow his—the way he's looking at the little creature is something she's seen only on the faces of proud or anxious fathers._

_Then the other children come out, and she begins to understand._

_There are a dozen or so, boys and girls, ranging in age from barely old enough for school to a shade too young for the Army. All dirty, all clearly hungry. Barnes talks to all of them, listens carefully, and hands out chocolate like he's Father Christmas. Once or twice, he smiles, or his face lights up as if he's telling a story or a joke. The children seem to appreciate him as much as he does them._

_After an hour, when Peggy's beginning to feel the cold in her stiff limbs, the children leave, a few at a time. Barnes stands up, stretches, and slings his empty satchel onto his shoulder._

_Then he says, "You coulda come out, y'know. It's warmer over here."_

_Peggy rolls her eyes and steps into the moonlight. "And here I thought you had the world's most insatiable sweet tooth," she replies._

_"I got my share of cavities," Barnes admits with a tiny smirk. "But yeah. This is where the sugar's been goin'."_

_"Who are they? Orphans?"_

_"Some of 'em. Or evacuees who didn't like where they were, came back lookin' for home. Or kids whose folks don't treat 'em so well. The usual mix."_

_Peggy picks her way around a pile of fallen masonry. "And you keep them in sweets?"_

_Barnes shoots her a look. "It ain't like that. Those kids? They see everything that goes on in this town. Kids know how to be invisible, and they're curious. Anything funny goin' on in the neighborhood, they know all about. And half of 'em don't even remember what candy tastes like anymore."_

_"You—" Peggy laughs. "You have a spy network. Your own Baker Street Irregulars."_

_Barnes grins cheekily._

_"Sergeant, you work for an_ intelligence agency _. You don't need to do our job for us."_

_The smile vanishes. "Yeah? You guys let a Hydra spy in a room with Steve. Let him shoot a nice old man an' get away with it. Tell me again about intelligence."_

_But he glances at the gap in the wall where the first little girl left, and Peggy isn't fooled. She's heard Steve's stories about Barnes and his younger sisters._

_"Well, then," she says brightly, glossing over the entire subject, "what say we go somewhere warm and discuss what you've learned?"_

"I'll bring the car around," Anna announced as Peggy blinked out of the memory. Taking Peggy's nod as assent, she set off around the corner to their parking space. 

Bucky stood on the sidewalk, gnawing delicately on the tip of his hunk of chocolate, lost to his own little world. The ghost of Steve stood by him, glowing with fondness.

Then the figment raised his head. A split second later, Bucky followed his gaze.

Peggy turned to look over her shoulder. There was only one person on the sidewalk between them and the corner where Anna had disappeared, in the space where Bucky and ghost-Steve were looking—a smiling girl in a blue overcoat who couldn't have been more than sixteen. She walked briskly toward them, and her smile was wrong.

Peggy had just begun reaching for the gun in her handbag when the girl looked past her at Bucky and said, " _Matryoshka_." 

There was a sickening thud. Peggy whirled to see Bucky crumpled on the pavement, his eyes half rolled back in his head, the packet of chocolate fallen from his fingers. She spun back to face the girl.

The girl's smile widened. 

Leviathan had found them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. _Harvey_ was a Pulitzer-winning 1940 play by Mary Chase that was pretty much as Angie described. Fun fact: I have seen the movie version with Jimmy Stewart about 20 times because my parents put it on (well, that or the Marx Brothers) whenever my siblings and I couldn't agree on what movie to watch, which was most of the time. The fact that I don't hate _Harvey_ now is a reflection of how good both the play and the movie really are. 
> 
> 2\. D-rations were horrible. They were designed to be slightly more appetizing than a boiled potato. I'm serious--it was a design requirement. No fool, Bucky, going for the commercial Hershey bars. 
> 
> 3\. You will all be delighted to know I tracked down a display of Hershey bars in my local grocery store to determine whether 50 of them (which is about five pounds) could fit into a U.S. Army satchel (a map case, in fact). They do, but it's a tight squeeze. I wish I had a picture of the clerk's face.
> 
> 4\. Yes, "Mr. Lieber" is a reference to one Stanley Martin Lieber ... better known to most of us as Stan Lee. That's right—there's a Stan Lee cameo in my fanfiction.
> 
> 5\. Come be my friend on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant there. My blog is 90% flailing about Bucky Barnes, and following me will help to ruin a fascist's day.


	6. What the Ghost Needs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peggy has a fight, Anna has a story, and Bucky has a moment of clarity.
> 
> None of these things goes as expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I really don't know what's going on at this point, but at least this chapter is chock full of Peggy being a badass. I've been a little concerned that there's too much Steve and Bucky in what is, after all, a Peggy fic, so I hope this restores the balance a wee bit.

_It's the smilers you can beat._

In the moment after Bucky collapsed, the sentence ran nonsensically through Peggy's head. She stood frozen, staring at the smiling girl in the blue coat, and she thought: _It's the smilers you can beat._

Sergeant Davies had said it. He'd already trained hundreds of SAS recruits by the time Phillips dropped Peggy into his lap, along with a dozen other newcomers to the Strategic Scientific Reserve. A leathery-skinned little man who seemed to be made entirely of sinew, he claimed to have been a soldier all his adult life, but Peggy wasn't fooled. She saw the scars, and boarding-school girl or no, she knew what the marks of a city gang fight were. Davies was a _soldier_ , all right. But he'd started out in a very different kind of war. 

She'd liked him immediately. None of the other recruits had. Probably because he'd opened his first training session by inviting a man to step up and punch him, and before the recruit could do more than step up, he'd kicked the man in the balls so fast no one had seen him move. 

After two weeks of furiously shouting recruits up and down the training camp, through rain and sleet and godawful mud, Davies had focused his particular venom on Peggy. There had been only two other women in the group, one a crier from Cambridge who'd quit after three days and the other a grim middle-aged woman from somewhere in Eastern Europe who hadn't made any noise at all. Davies had been all right with quitters, and he'd been all right with stern matrons. It was Peggy he couldn't abide, Peggy with her determined frown and her habit of picking herself up, battered and bruised, and _just bloody keeping going_. Add to that the fact that she'd smiled at Sergeant Davies every day—the same cheery smile she'd used for her most difficult tutors—and the man had clearly wanted to strangle her at the first opportunity. He'd shouted at her. He'd singled her out for extra laps, extra blows, extra trick questions. He'd kicked her into the mud about every other day, as if he expected her to cry at dirty clothes.

She'd just kept smiling.

"I can't believe they stuck me with a bloody _smiler_ ," he'd complained one afternoon in her hearing.

"Sir, what's the matter with smiling, sir?" Peggy had replied, standing at attention. 

Davies had rounded on her immediately. "What's the _matter_ , Carter?" he shrieked. "What's the _matter_? I've been fighting thirty years, man and boy, and I'll tell you what's the _matter_. You don't _smile_ in an alley scrap, Carter. You don't _smile_ on a battlefield. _Smilin'_ means you think you've won. _Smilin'_ means you're so bloody confident you don't mind the other fella knowin' it. And that's _stupid_ , Carter. You never give the other fella anything. It's the smilers you can beat." 

"Sir. That's not why I smile, sir."

" _Oh?_ " Davies turned the syllable into a mocking squeal, as if he'd been surprised by an invitation to tea with the queen. "Then enlighten me, Carter. Why are you always smilin'?"

"Sir, because you're here, sir."

"Don't butter me up, Carter. It doesn't suit."

"Sir, no, sir." Peggy had cocked her head. "I smile because as long as you're shouting at me, I've still got a shot to get into the war, and a chance to come out of it alive. That's all I've ever wanted, sir. A chance."

"Pretty piss-poor chance, Carter."

"Only kind of chance to be had, sir."

That had earned her a rare, broken-toothed grin. "Get over here, Carter. Let's see if you've got anythin' worth knowin' under those sissy curls yet."

She'd spent the next twenty minutes trying industriously to kick Sergeant Davies in the fork. Nearly done it, too. 

Now, Peggy locked eyes at the smiling assassin on a New York street—a slender girl not old enough to be out of secondary school, with large blue eyes and wispy blonde hair that reminded Peggy oddly of Steve—and thought _I wonder what Sergeant Davies would make of you._

Peggy was already moving, pulling the pistol from her purse and stepping smartly between the girl and Bucky's crumpled body. "This isn't a good idea," she warned.

The girl merely smiled. And _blurred_.

Peggy had thought she'd seen everything with Dottie, but this was something else again. Blows landed, small fists pummeling her like triphammers, and she barely managed to get her arms up to block and hang on to her gun. She lashed out blindly, felt one hit land, had an instant flash of pleasure, and attacked. 

Later, she wouldn't remember it very clearly. That was the way in close combat, Sergeant Davies had always said. _Your brain's got better things to do than paint you pretty pictures, Carter. It's keepin' you alive, bloody let it._ Later she'd find out she'd beaten someone with a stapler or slammed their head in a refrigerator door without consciously realizing it, and she'd be faintly embarrassed, but it didn't matter much. If she was thinking about it later, after all, she'd _won_. And that was all that mattered.

She wasn't sure she'd win this one. The Leviathan girl was _fast_ , faster than anyone Peggy had ever seen who wasn't Steve, and she was little and vicious and there was a knife somehow and the gun wasn't going to stay in Peggy's hand for very long, but she had to keep fighting, Bucky was counting on her, he was helpless—

And then, out of a clear blue sky, there was the roar and whine of a hideously overdesigned engine, and everyone froze.

Well, Peggy froze. The girl continued the spin she'd been in the middle of, slicing toward Peggy's face with her knife, but then she just ... kept turning. 

And fell in a heap on the sidewalk.

Her face was turned upward. There was a familiar red-striped hook made of pure sugar sticking out of her eye, the blood still trickling sluggishly from a wound that surely went all the way to her brain. 

Peggy looked up. 

Howard's car was hovering perhaps fifteen feet above the pavement, its wheels tucked up like a windhover's feet and little devices bolted to its underside glowing softly blue. Its engine was making the sound Peggy had heard, and a familiar dark head was leaning over the side, smirking at her. 

"Anna," Peggy said in wonder. 

"No time!" Anna called. "Get in!"

The car hummed down to street level, bumping roughly onto the pavement as Peggy heaved Bucky onto her shoulders, dragged him to the open back door, and shoved him inside. He flopped down on the back seat, all loose limbs, but his eyes were open now, staring through her. She hadn't seen that look on his face since France. She slammed the door.

"Get in!" Anna repeated. 

"Half a tick!" Peggy replied, struck by a sudden inspiration. She lunged back to the sidewalk and snatched up a forgotten object. Then she dove through the open passenger door, slammed it behind her, and yelped as Anna flipped a switch and the car lurched into the air again. 

Rather than asking how Anna had come to be in possession of one of Howard's fabled flying cars—to say nothing of how they'd ended up actually _working_ —Peggy turned around in her seat. 

"Bucky," she said sharply, and was rewarded with a vague flicker of his eyes. He didn't look at her, exactly, but he seemed somehow aware of her. She reached back, took his right hand as gently as possible, and pressed his packet of chocolate into his unresisting fingers. The fellow had just narrowly evaded recapture by Leviathan; he probably needed the calories. 

Bucky made a soft, strangled noise that Peggy chose to interpret as _thank you_ , so she decided he was all right for the moment and turned back to gaze through the windshield as Anna steered them up and over the streets of Brooklyn, then banked sharply toward the river. 

"Do you regularly kill people with candy canes?" Peggy asked calmly. 

Anna's mouth quirked. "No. Usually it's knitting needles. They're reusable." 

"Very practical."

They flew on in silence for several minutes while Peggy ran the variables through her head. Nothing made the sum came out right.

Finally, Anna cleared her throat and said, in her careful accent, "I wouldn't harm you, Miss Carter. It would break Edwin's heart."

"What if Leviathan ordered you to?" Peggy asked.

In the backseat, Barnes whimpered faintly at the word.

"If Leviathan comes for me," Anna replied, "it will not be with orders. It will be with a bullet from a great distance."

"Left without a reference, did we?" Peggy muttered.

"They think I am dead," Anna said without taking her eyes off the air in front of them. "No longer."

"You have quite the sense of moment for a dead woman," Peggy said, turning around in her seat and pulling a blanket out of the footwell. She tossed it over Bucky's shoulders. He appeared to be staring through her at the clouds, but his shoulders relaxed a little. Well, the right one did.

"I never planned to blow this cover," Anna replied. "It was necessary. Do you think Edwin will understand?" She sounded worried.

"That depends," Peggy said delicately, "on how much he understands already."

"Nothing," Anna said, almost too quietly to be heard over the rush of the wind outside the car. "My beautiful boy. He understands nothing. He told you we met in Budapest?"

"Yes. The hotel."

"I sold him a tie," Anna agreed. "But really I was selling him myself." 

Peggy arched an eyebrow.

"It was his job," Anna explained. "His general. Leviathan wanted access. They selected Edwin as their entry point. They sent me to get him."

"What changed?"

"I did. Edwin, he—he didn't know, of course. He'd never had a woman look twice at him, I think. He tried to do everything men are supposed to do with women. He took me dancing." She smiled dreamily.

"Any good?" Peggy asked.

"Terrible." Anna laughed. "Like a goat with brain damage. But he was so gentle with me, and he enjoyed it so. He was the worst dancer I had ever met, and he danced like Nijinsky. Like it was joy to him. I thought ..." She sighed heavily. "Where I come from, a man would be ashamed of this. Leviathan would kill him for such failure. But Edwin refused to bow to that. He danced, very badly, and he laughed."

"You fell in love," Peggy said.

"I did. And my cover identity was Jewish, and the Germans ..." She shrugged. "I could not tell him not to save me. I laid traps. Failsafes, to make sure no one would come after me. And then I let them think I had died in the escape." She tilted her head. "A lot of Jews did."

"They let you go so easily?" Peggy was incredulous.

"I never said it was easy."

"And what—you sat out the entire war as a refugee? As a _housewife?_ " It was impossible to completely conceal her scorn. She didn't mind most women staying out of combat, but to think what someone like Anna could have meant to the Commandos ...

_She could have saved Bucky. Or Steve._

Anna snorted. "Have you noticed anything unusual about Mister Stark?"

"Where would you like me to begin the list?" Peggy asked dryly, leaving off her painful thoughts.

"With the fact that he is still breathing."

Peggy blinked. She hadn't thought about it before. "Howard never travels with a bodyguard," she said slowly. "He travels with ..."

"Edwin. And _I_ travel with _him_."

" _Howard_ knows? You're his protection?"

"From everything except VD," Anna said, and the scorn in her voice made Peggy laugh heartily.

Laughing at off-color humor, while soaring over Manhattan in a flying car with a catatonic super-soldier in the backseat. Say this for life in the SSR—it was never boring.

"Howard asked Mr. Jarvis once if I'd tried your goulash," she told Anna, having a sudden realization. "Was that a euphemism? Would you have slipped me—I don't know, truth serum, or poison?" She grinned.

"I would never sully my goulash recipe with poison!" the woman retorted, her voice filled with horror. Then she added, "It would be in the wine."

"Good to know you have _some_ standards."

—

Landing the flying car turned out to be considerably more difficult than taking off had been. A city street wouldn't work, for obvious reasons; even though Anna claimed she could easily cut the "gravitic reversors" (damn Howard and his technical doubletalk) and drop the car neatly into an open space in traffic, there weren't that many open spaces in New York City on a busy afternoon. Besides, there was always the possibility they'd give some nearby driver a heart attack.

Peggy looked back at Bucky when he went quiet. He was curled into a ball, face buried in the blanket, shaking.

"Mind the helm," she told Anna, and climbed into the back of the car. "Budge over," she told Bucky, nudging him gently aside, and he curled up enough to allow her to sit beside him. She ran her fingers over his hair and rubbed at his exposed back, feeling him tremble. She was acutely aware of how vulnerable she was at the moment—thousands of feet in the air over Manhattan in one of Howard's famously unreliable experiments. And trapped in an enclosed space with a former Leviathan assassin, however friendly at the moment, and a man having some kind of mental breakdown.

Well, she could trust Anna to fly them straight, probably, since the woman's own survival depended on it. But Bucky was another matter.

Between one moment and the next, Steve appeared, sitting on the other side of his friend and looking panicked half to death. Fantastic. Even her hallucinations were disappointed in her.

Except he wasn't just _her_ hallucination, was he? Bucky had claimed to see Steve, too, at least once. And back at the candy shop, he'd turned to look the way Steve had done before anyone else had realized something was wrong. Peggy wasn't up to date on the latest psychology, but she had never heard of two people having the same delusion independent of one another. And she'd never heard of a hallucination standing watch.

She locked eyes with her ghostly love. _Steve?_ she mouthed.

His eyes widened, and he looked from her to Bucky and back. Then he nodded.

Oh, well. In for a penny ... _Help me_ , she said, shaping the words without speaking them, and laid a hand on Bucky's trembling shoulder.

Steve's lower lip was trembling, too, but he nodded and bent over his friend, intangible mouth almost brushing the curve of Bucky's ear. His lips moved, quick and sharp, and she couldn't make out what he was saying but she could see the funny twisting at the corners she associated with the thick Brooklyn accent the boys had always reserved for each other. The USO had tried valiantly to train it out of Steve, and onstage he could pass for a man from Cleveland—wherever _that_ was; according to Steve, it was the source of the perfect non-regional American accent—but around Bucky, the Navy Yard sound had always come tumbling out of him quicker than he could stop it. And Bucky had never lost the knack at all. He was Brooklyn all the time.

At the sound of whatever Steve had said, Bucky curled into a tighter ball and moaned, just loudly enough to be heard over the wind.

The chocolate lay forgotten on the floorboard. Peggy picked it up, brushed a little carpet lint off it, and broke off a corner. Slowly she drew back the blanket, exposing Bucky's pale face. He was wearing an expression she had previously seen only in frescoes prominently featuring damned souls. His mouth was drawn back in an awful grimace, and he stared right through her with helpless, pleading eyes.

Peggy put the chocolate to his lips. He opened his mouth obediently at her touch, but made no attempt to take the candy. She ended up popping it onto his tongue, unwilling to risk putting her fingers past his teeth. 

He closed his mouth slowly, and his cheeks hollowed out a little as he sucked.

Steve looked like he was going to cry.

Not having any better ideas, Peggy began stroking Bucky's hair. He closed his eyes, but the tense lines of his body under the blanket didn't change. Peggy watched Steve out of the corner of her eye. He was talking again, but his eyes were fixed on his friend, and she could only lip-read occasional words through his mush-mouthed American elocution.

_Bucky ... so sorry ... look at me ... Bucky, pal ... miss you ..._

Peggy had always admired Steve's tactical ability. For someone whose military education had come largely from books, he'd been surprisingly good at laying out battle plans, getting men to follow him into danger, and bringing them home safe again. She'd heard that a couple of Howling Commando raids were being written up as textbook cases for future West Point cadets to study, which was quote the compliment. But she was quite sure they wouldn't mention that Steve's knack for strategy went out the window the moment Bucky Barnes winced in pain. Bucky in danger meant Steve jumping out of planes, often without a parachute.

And she was sure, now, that this _was_ Steve Rogers she was dealing with. The genuine article. No one else could be this much of a wreck over James Buchanan Barnes.

_"I don't know what to do," Steve is saying, over and over, when Peggy finds him sitting under the dripping overhang of the treeline outside camp. Of course the man wandered out in the rain to obsess about his worries. It would be sweet if Peggy hadn't always hated Romantic heroes. Two days after he marched back into camp with a broken transmitter and four hundred new friends, however, it's just annoying._

_"Do about what?" Peggy demands. She's only just got Phillips to agree to send Steve back into combat, with many a promise of perfect obedience to future orders, and now is not the time for him to fall apart._

_Steve scrambles to his feet at the sound of her voice, starts to salute, and immediately blushes crimson._

_"Agent—Peggy—ma'am!" He shoves his hands behind his back and snaps to parade rest._

_Oh, dear, oh, dear. This is Steve trying to be a proper soldier. He_ is _in a bad way._

_"Is something troubling you, Captain?" Peggy asks him crisply, since military protocol seems to be the order of the moment._

_"No, ma'am."_

_Peggy gives him an arch look. "You do realize I'm a superior officer, do you not?"_

_"Really?"_

_His surprise is so genuine that Peggy has to laugh. "_ Yes, really, _Steve. What did you think I was? And if you say a secretary, you know what'll happen."_

_That gets a big, goofy, slightly mischievous grin. "I never thought you were a secretary."_

_She narrows her eyes at him. "What did you think, then?" She can't quite resist asking._

_He shrugs eloquently. "It's the SSR. I figured you were a secret weapon."_

_She snorts. He blushes darker._

_She prods him in the ribs with a finger. Even after being out in a rainstorm, his flesh is warm. "All right, out with it, then. What's the matter?"_

_The grin vanishes immediately. "It's—it's Bucky. He won't talk to me."_

_"Did you two have a falling-out?" she asks, thinking of half a dozen possible points of contention. Barnes can't have been happy to learn the frail asthmatic he'd spent his life protecting went and volunteered for a life-threatening experiment. And that's before Peggy herself gets involved._

_Steve shakes his head. "I wish. If he was mad at me, he'd just sock me and get it over with. But he isn't. He was fine on the march back to camp, but now he won't talk to me. Or anybody. He just stares into space. It's like he's not even there." He looks down at his boots. "I don't wanna take him to medical."_

_"No, of course not." The medical tent is the last place Barnes belongs right now. He's had enough needles to last him several lifetimes._

_"I don't know what to_ do _," Steve says miserably. "I checked him all over. He's not bleeding or anything. He's got some bruises, but nothing too bad. He needs a bath, but so does the whole division. I dunno what's wrong."_

_Peggy purses her lips. "Let me have a look? There might be something you missed."_

_The face he makes is pathetically grateful. "Would you? I'd owe you one, Agent—I mean—"_

_"Peggy," she says. "Call me Peggy. Let's just make that permanent, shall we? Agent Carter if we're being official, Peggy if we're not. All right?" The words tumble out in a rush, and even she can't quite believe she's said them. She never lets anyone use her first name, and she_ especially _never permits the use of a diminutive. She's Peggy to her family, and one or two school chums, and that's it. But she suddenly realizes she very much wants Steve to call her something other than Agent._

_Steve's smile could light up half of New York. "You got it, Peggy."_

_He's practically floating all the way back to his tent, and Peggy's feeling lighter herself. Much as she's always been careful never to define herself by a man's opinion, Steve's joy at being placed on a first-name basis with her makes her feel like someone's lit a candle in her chest. The approval of a good man is apparently quite the drug._

_The intoxication lasts just until she sees Barnes._

_He's sitting on a cot at the front of the tent, knees tucked up to his chest, eyes blank and fixed on the middle distance. The purple shadows under his eyes make him look like he's been punched, though she's certain Steve wouldn't allow that. Barnes is thin and pale and unshaven and stinks of sour sweat._

_Peggy's first thought is_ He looks as if he's seen a ghost. _Then she corrects herself:_ No, he looks as if he _is_ one. __

_Oddly enough, Peggy is at least vaguely familiar with how to get along with a ghost. She spent the summer after her brother's birth bunking with distant relations in a large, drafty country house, and at first she assumed her cousins were trying to frighten her by filling her ears with tales of a wailing woman in grey who haunted the upper floors. Then she actually met the lady in question one night, and discovered that there was nothing much to be afraid of. Mostly the ghost paced the third-floor corridor, weeping softly and ignoring people. Peggy, ever curious, took to sitting up late with a cup of tea and jotting down observations in a notebook. Eventually she deduced that the woman's attention was focused on a door at the west end of the hall—a linen closet that had apparently been something else entirely in the time when ladies wore crinolines._

_She took to leaving the linen-closet door ajar before going to bed each night. The maid complained in the morning, but the wailing stopped and Peggy never owned up._

_There were two other ghosts after that. The boarding school was home to the specter of a girl who, according to dormitory legend, had hanged herself in a lavatory after discovering she was pregnant. Peggy actually managed to talk to her once or twice, and assured the girl that her mother was well and happy and her child was cared for. Peggy couldn't confirm either of these statements, of course—not least because the baby had presumably died in the womb—but it was clearly what the girl needed to hear, and for the rest of Peggy's time at that school there was a notable shortage of random objects flying off shelves, and a few unlikely drafts that seemed to follow classroom bullies around once they crossed Peggy Carter. Later on, of course, Oxford was full of ghosts, and Peggy got quite chummy in a silent sort of way with a monk who haunted the Bodleian Library._

_She never once considered her facility with ghosts unusual. Not until she joined an American military unit and discovered that most of her colleagues believed that dying somehow changed people. Perhaps it was a trans-Atlantic difference; if a country as young as the United States had many ghosts, they would presumably be Indians, for the most part, and less than inclined to chat with the descendants of the people who had killed them._

_So when she walks into Steve's tent and sees Barnes' haunting stare, she reflects that she's probably the best qualified to do something about it._

_She doesn't call him by name, because to her he's_ Sergeant Barnes _and if he didn't respond to Steve calling him_ Bucky _, he's hardly going to answer to his rank from her lips. And she doesn't touch him because he's clearly had more than enough of being touched without his consent._

_Instead, she thinks furiously about what the ghost needs._

_Then she sits down beside him on the cot, leans slowly over to his ear, and whispers three words, careful to keep them soft enough that even a super-soldier's hearing won't catch them._

_Barnes blinks, and gradually his eyes come back into focus. He looks up at his friend, hovering in the doorway of the tent._

_"Steve," he whispers, and that's all it takes. Steve is across the space in two strides, throwing his arms around Barnes and gathering him up like a child. Barnes realizes a little too late what's happening, and starts to squirm. "Steve, leggo, ya meatball—"_

_Peggy slips out of the tent, smiling to herself._

The car landed on the roof of Howard's penthouse with a bone-jarring thump, like an airplane landing roughly. Anna swore virulently in Russian as something began to hiss, but Peggy ignored her. Bucky hadn't moved at all, just kept staring. Beside him, the ghost of Steve Rogers leaned in, lips moving silently against the blanket covering one of Bucky's ears.

"Bucky?" Peggy asked gently. 

No response. Only more staring.

This was a problem. Moving an unconscious Bucky Barnes into the penthouse once had been difficult enough. There was no telling how he'd react to being pulled or picked up in his current state.

And Angie was out at an audition, as far as Peggy knew, so a Snow White kiss was hardly on the table.

"Anna," Peggy said, more calmly than was probably warranted, "do you know what's happened to him?"

"They called it, eh, stand-by mode?" Anna turned around in the driver's seat and frowned at Bucky. "It's a very strong hypnotic suggestion. There is a trigger word to activate it, and another to bring him out. Some of the subjects, they could stay standing by if they really wanted to, as well."

Peggy nodded grimly. "So he might be waiting for Leviathan's orders, or he might be hiding out inside his own mind?"

"More likely the latter," Anna said. "That arm, it would have involved a lot of programming. He would have ways of dealing with the pain and fear."

"How can you be so sure?"

"He's alive, is he not?"

"Hmm." Peggy peered into Bucky's wide, empty eyes. "I'm sorry about this," she told him, and leaned in to whisper in his ear. The same three words, the ones that had woken him outside Azzano.

Steve flinched as she said them. Either his hearing or his lip-reading had improved after death.

Bucky came awake this time with a shudder and a choked-off cry. His eyes focused on Peggy's face for a long, terrified moment.

Then he lunged for the car door, threw it open, and bolted out.

Peggy was after him, Anna on her heels, but he was quicker than either one of them. The roof door shattered under his metal fist and he plunged down the stairs, vaulting from one flight to the next without apparent regard for the chance he'd break his leg or his neck. Anna surged past Peggy like a gazelle and swung herself over the railing with a grace Peggy had previously seen only in Dottie Underwood. She dropped like a stone, but Bucky had a head start and they both vanished into the dark of the stairwell before Peggy had made it two flights down.

She ran as fast as she dared, following the thud of Bucky's footfalls and the click of Anna's heels. She was still in hot pursuit when she realized she wasn't alone.

The ghost of Steve was beside her, taking every step as she did. She nearly tripped down the stairs when she caught a flash of blond hair in her peripheral vision.

"What are you still doing here?" she snapped at him, still clattering downward. "Go after him!"

Steve gave her a calm look and stuck out his chin in an unmistakable gesture of stubbornness. 

"Bloody hell," Peggy growled. "I'm perfectly capable of descending the stairs unaided, Steve! Go look after your friend!"

She wasn't sure how much he understood of her words, but her face and tone likely said enough. Steve stuck out his lower lip, too.

Peggy snarled under her breath, then forced herself to think. "For God's sake," she muttered. "What do you _need?_ "

Steve pulled himself up straight and reached out with one hand.

It passed right through Peggy's, where it was sliding along the railing to steady her on the downward plunge.

"Steve," Peggy said, her voice thick, and she was sure as she halted that the look on her face now mirrored the stricken one on his. "You came back."

He nodded, his mouth twisting in grief.

"It's been so long, darling."

His eyebrows lifted, and he gave her a sad, broken smile. He hopped down two steps, then held out his hand to her again. On anyone else, it would have been chivalrous and condescending. On Steve ...

Well, he of all men had never taken her for granted.

The sound of the chase had faded. Peggy had no idea where Bucky and Anna had gone, and the way they'd been going at it didn't bear thinking about.

"Steve," Peggy repeated. "Can you help me? I have to find him."

Steve smiled.

—

Of course a ghost knew shortcuts. Six minutes later, Peggy was in the apartment, walking up to a familiar door. Anna was leaning against it.

"He ran into my bedroom?" Peggy asked dryly. The comment was directed more at Steve than at Anna, but it was the woman who answered.

"He doesn't like being chased," she said with an eloquent shrug. "I think he was aiming for a safe spot."

"He won't be safe from me," Peggy retorted, and she rapped on the door with her knuckles. "Bucky! Come out of there right now."

"Go to hell."

The voice was low and broken. He sounded like he'd been crying.

Pegg tried the knob. It rattled, but wouldn't give. Locked, then. She could pick it or break it down, of course, but that would only create new problems. 

"We're trying to help you, Bucky," she called, "but we can't do that with you barricaded in my bedroom."

"You lied to me, Carter."

"I did no such thing!"

_"Yes, you goddamn did!"_ His voice rose to something like a shriek on the last word. "You told me—you told me—"

Peggy didn't need him to finish the sentence. Bloody three words.

"I told you _Steve needs you_ ," she supplied.

There was a jagged laugh from the other side of the door. "And we both know that ain't true, don't we, Carter? You're good, but I finally figured it out. Steve doesn't need me. He doesn't need anything anymore. Steve's dead."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Peggy's training is loosely based on accounts of SOE training and Camp X in Canada, which served as a training ground for American spies during the war. Sergeant Davies' style of self-introduction comes from an inhabitant of Camp X. Gee, I wonder where Peggy learned to say hello with her fist?
> 
> 2\. You, dear readers, are entirely to blame for Imaginary Steve morphing into Ghost Steve. It's ALL YOUR FAULT.
> 
> 3\. I had better not be the first person to connect Anna Jarvis and the Red Room because come ON, they met in BUDAPEST.
> 
> 4\. Come be my friend on Tumblr! I am onethingconstant there. Join me for Bucky, Peggy, 10% other stuff, and the chance to ruin a fascist's day just by existing. (I wish I were kidding about the fascist but I absolutely AM NOT.)


	7. Connecting the Calls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky needs some alone time. Peggy makes new friends she doesn't want. Jarvis worries. Howard tries to help. Sousa has something to say. Peggy goes downstairs. 
> 
> _"Angie, has anything odd been going on in the last couple of hours?"_
> 
> _"You wanna tell me what counts as ‘odd’ around here, English? Because I’ve kinda lost my sense of normal, living with you.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that River of Truth is running, I will try to alternate chapters until this is done. 
> 
> Also, I would be embarrassingly grateful for any comments you guys feel like leaving. I'm having a difficult time personally right now, and I could use some positive reinforcement.

7\. Connecting the Calls

“Bucky?” Peggy called. But he’d stopped answering, stopped moving. She looked over at Anna and mouthed _Standby mode?_

Anna shrugged and shook her head. Then she flicked her eyes toward the sitting room. Grumbling under her breath, Peggy followed her lead. 

She paused in the sitting-room doorway and looked back into the hall. The ghost of Steve Rogers stood by the door, one intangible hand resting against the wood as he gazed longingly at it. _Can’t he just walk through?_ Peggy wondered. Then she remembered the weeping woman. Perhaps it wasn’t always about the physical barriers, with ghosts. 

_Ghosts. He’s a ghost. I have Steve back, but he’s a ghost._

_Just when I thought I’d learned the limits of universal cruelty._

She left him there. Let him decide where he was most needed. She’d never precisely been able to tell Steve Rogers anything, anyway. 

“Tea?” Anna asked, pouring from a carafe on the coffee table.

“Isn’t it cold?” Peggy replied as she strolled over.

“I’m Russian,” Anna answered. “Or I was.”

Peggy arched an eyebrow, but took a cup of tepid brown liquid. She’d met Americans who drank the stuff iced. It was a strange world. 

“So,” Anna said coolly, settling in with her own cup. “What is our next move?”

“Removing my bedroom door?” Peggy suggested.

Anna flapped a dismissive hand. “Not Barnes. Let him sulk. He’ll come out of it. I meant our mission.”

“Our mission, is it now?” Peggy took a sip and made a face. “I wasn’t aware you were on the team.”

“I’ve been shot at. Is that not your equivalent of an entrance exam?”

“Fair enough. What do you suggest?”

Anna pursed her lips. “If you want to know what they were using him for, you’ll need to find out how he was used. How he was _prepared_ for use. Function dictates form.”

“He said it was a combination of drugs and behavioral conditioning. Like Pavlov’s dog, perhaps.”

“Hm.” Anna shrugged. “That doesn’t narrow it down much. It would make more sense to identify the scientists on the project and triangulate their areas of expertise.”

“He didn’t mention any scientists by name. He could tell me only that they spoke Russian, and that he heard the name ‘Leviathan’.” 

Anna growled. “Not much of a spy, your man, is he?”

“Sergeant Barnes,” Peggy said primly, “was a soldier first, last, and always.”

Anna shook her head in disgust. “A child would have gotten more than that. A Russian child, anyway. It’s a wonder he survived their attentions, as shattered as he is.”

“It’s not entirely Leviathan’s work,” Peggy explained, feeling her jaw tighten with frustration. For Anna to sit and blithely dismiss Bucky’s horrid treatment without even trying to understand it—“He was a prisoner of war before they ever got hold of him. He was tortured by Hydra.”

Anna arched an eyebrow. “Anything special?”

“Have you ever heard of Arnim Zola?” Peggy retorted. “He used prisoners as test subjects in his sadistic experiments, killed nearly all—”

The penny dropped. 

Peggy looked down at her teacup for a heartbeat, then up at Anna.

Their smiles were fierce, predatory, and identical.

*

“Agent Carter,” the pudgy little man lisped as he was shoved roughly into the chair in the interview room. “A delightful surprise.”

“Doctor Zola,” Peggy replied evenly. “I do hope I haven’t taken you away from any pressing experiments.”

“I believe the mold in my cell can continue growing unsupervised for a few hours.”

“Sounds fascinating.” She drew a folder out of her portfolio and set it on the desk. Behind her, she heard the softest of sounds as Anna took up her position near the door. “It’s your earlier work that concerns me today.”

“Oh?” Zola sounded supremely bored.

“The Krausberg facility. You were conducting a series of experiments.”

“I conducted many experiments.”

“This is about the one that failed.”

“None of them failed.”

“Would you call walking out the front gate with the factory burning behind him a success, then?” 

Zola said nothing. Peggy looked up.

He was gazing over her shoulder, at the spot where she and Anna had agreed the Leviathan refugee would stand. His face looked blank, but it was the careful blankness of the fresh-meat poker player, the inexperienced charlatan. 

Peggy couldn’t actually smell fear, but she could read it in Zola’s eyes. 

“Is something the matter, Doctor?” she asked sweetly.

Zola jerked his attention back to her face. “Not at all,” he said, apparently on reflex. “What is it you want to know?”

“Everything you can tell me about the Krausberg experiments,” she replied. 

“I’m afraid my notes were destroyed in the fire.”

“That’s quite all right. I’ve got all the time in the world for you to remember.”

Zola’s eyes flicked to Anna again. “It appears I may not.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” He smiled, and there was something cold and oily in it. “Ask your questions, Agent. I have nothing better to do with my day.”

*

“Well,” Anna remarked as they strolled out of the prison, “that was three hours of breathing I won’t get back.”

“He was less than helpful,” Peggy admitted. “But I don’t think he realized we were working on anything immediate involving Bucky.”

“Perhaps,” was the reply. “But we are no closer to your goal. And I doubt Barnes will be inclined to help any further.”

“That’s all right,” Peggy growled. “I know how to _make_ him inclined.” And she stalked off to find the nearest payphone. 

The line clicked on in the middle of the first ring.

“Sousa.” He sounded bored.

“Daniel, it’s me.”

“Oh, hello, Mother. I didn’t realize you were in town.”

“Thompson’s still on the warpath, is he?” She rolled her eyes.

“You know how it is, Ma. Work, work, work, all the time. How’s Uncle Howard?”

Peggy leaned on the glass of the booth. “This isn’t about him, I’m afraid. I need to find next of kin for someone. I’ve got his personnel file, but the file hasn’t been updated since the war, and a lot of people have moved around. Can you check?”

“You know, dinner sounds pretty good. How’s tonight? I think I can get off by six.”

“That’d be perfect. Bring whatever you can. I’ll call back in an hour in case you find anything I can act on immediately. The family I’m looking for is that of James Buchanan Barnes. I’ve got his parents’ last known address, but that’s it.” She pulled the slip of paper out of her handbag and read it off to Sousa. She heard the thin scratch of his pencil as he took notes on the other end.

“That’ll be just swell, Ma. I’ll see you at six-thirty at Uncle Howie’s place. I love you too.”

He hung up before she could say anything else.

_I love you too._

Well, that certainly put things out in the open. Damn him. Peggy replaced the receiver and knocked her forehead gently against the dial. One of these days, she was going to strangle one of these infuriating men. 

She dropped another quarter into the phone and dialed her next number. 

“Stark residence.” The crisp, familiar accent made her want to sob with relief.

“Mister Jarvis?” Peggy asked. “I need you to relay a message to Howard. Does he by any chance have an invention that can monitor a human being on the other side of a solid wall?”

Jarvis made a little _er_ noise. “Does the wall need to remain intact?”

“It would be preferable, as the wall is in Howard’s penthouse.”

“Oh, _dear_. I hope nothing’s gone awry with your houseguest.”

“He’s having a bit of a sulk. Things would go more smoothly if I could make sure he was all right.” _Not least because it might stop Steve moping._

“Hmmm.” The pause went on entirely too long.

Peggy closed her eyes and hoped.

“Do you know, I might know of just the thing. We’d need Mister Stark himself to operate it, though. I’m afraid it’s rather fidgety.”

“Can you have Howard bring it to the penthouse as soon as possible? I’d like to be certain Sergeant Barnes isn’t building a bomb to blow himself up with in there.”

She heard Jarvis swallow. “Is that—a possibility?” he asked, with exaggerated nonchalance.

Peggy did a quick mental inventory of the contents of her wardrobe, plus the range of explosives Dernier had taught the Commandos to use during the war. “If he’s sufficiently creative,” she hedged. “And has enough time.”

“Right you are. I’ll bring them both over immediately.”

“Mister Jarvis, you are a treasure.”

She hung up and hurried back to Anna and the car.

“You know,” Anna remarked as Peggy slid into the passenger seat, “I could have gotten more from that little scientist.”

“I’m sure,” Peggy replied. “But we couldn’t afford to have him report your methods to the warden.”

“He wouldn’t have,” Anna said simply.

Peggy looked out the window so Anna couldn’t catch sight of her face.

*

Angie was pacing the sitting-room floor when they reached the penthouse.

“What’s going on?” Peggy asked her, walking forward with her arms extended to offer the hug Angie obviously needed.

“I knocked,” Angie told her, pulling her into an embrace, “but he wouldn’t say anything. I thought he liked me a little. What _happened?_ ” 

“I’m afraid I’ve mucked it up,” Peggy admitted. “He found out about Steve, and not in the way I intended.”

“Geez, Peg.” Angie pulled away, the color draining from her face. “You don’t think he’s—?”

Peggy shook her head. “I sincerely hope not. Bucky’s a survivor above all, so I don’t think he’d do anything rash.” 

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Anna remarked as she strolled in and set her purse on a side table. “Didn’t you say he was friends with Steve Rogers? I’d call that a history of impulsive behavior.”

_Is_ , Peggy wanted to correct. _Is_ friends with Steve Rogers. As far as she was concerned, a ghostly Steve was still Steve in nearly every way that counted. Speaking of which …

“Angie, has anything odd been going on in the last couple of hours?” she asked, wondering what sort of behavior Steve might get up to that Angie would notice. He obviously wasn’t a traditional chain-rattler and he didn’t walk around looking for his own head—thank God—but surely if he were distressed enough, he’d get noticed. Cold spots, perhaps, or objects flying off shelves.

Angie gave her a flat look. “You wanna tell me what counts as ‘odd’ around here, English? Because I’ve kinda lost my sense of normal, living with you.”

Peggy went pink. 

“Not that I’m complaining.” Angie smirked. “Anyway, if that’s your way of asking whether Mister Fancy made it here, yeah, he an’ Howard are back fiddling with your door. I dunno why a genius engineer can’t just take the thing apart. I mean, either genius school or butler school has gotta have lock-picking classes, right?”

“I’m afraid lock-picking is more my area, darling.” Peggy glanced over at Anna. “And we don’t know what Bucky’s doing on the other side of the door.”

“What, like booby-traps?” Angie sounded intrigued.

“For a given kind of booby,” Anna said. Her voice was sour. 

Peggy rolled her eyes. _Save me from Russian egos._ She left Anna and Angie to have it out, and went to see about getting back into her bedroom.

The first thing she noticed when she turned down the corridor was Steve, sitting against the wall by her door with his arms around his knees and his head sunk miserably on his forearms. She also found Jarvis hovering in the middle of the hallway while Howard crouched outside the door. He had what looked like a bulky pair of headphones covering his ears, a hastily soldered metal box on the floor beside him, and pressed up against the door was—

“Mister Jarvis?” Peggy inquired politely, because this was going to make slightly more sense in proper English. Steve lifted his head at the sound of her voice and gave her a miserable look. 

“Yes, Miss Carter?” The butler looked up, brightening at the opportunity to be distracted from the potential bedroom bomb.

“Would you consider yourself familiar with your employer’s inventions?”

“In broad strokes, yes.” 

“Then perhaps you could enlighten me—is that a toilet plunger?” Peggy tilted her head to one side, trying to get a better look at the rubber suction cup currently adhering itself to her bedroom door.

“I believe it has to be called something else when the handle is removed, but yes, that is the origin of that particular part.” Jarvis drew himself up to his full, gawky height. “In Mister Stark’s defense, his use of readily available materials in no way impedes the performance of his inventions. In fact, he once constructed an entirely serviceable automatic cocktail shaker using only—”

“I don’t need to know.”

“Oh. Yes. Well. That _is_ a toilet plunger, then.”

“Yeah, for all the good it’s doing me.” Howard snarled under his breath and yanked his headphones off. “Hey, Little Brooklyn!” he yelled through the door. “You’re too stubborn for anybody’s good, you know that?”

The only answer was a loud _thud_. Peggy jumped. If Bucky had just punched the door with his human hand, his strength had increased considerably since the last time she’d seen him in a bar brawl. 

Steve glared at the engineer.

“Do you have to antagonize him?” she demanded of Howard. 

“Sorry.” Howard rubbed the back of his neck. “I hate it when houseguests get snoopy. Normally, y’know, I can just kick ’em out of bed, but—”

“Yes, I understand.” Peggy pressed fingertips to the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “I was going to ask whether Bucky’s still alive in there, but I believe we’ve just answered that.”

“He’s alive and he’s pacing back and forth.” Howard patted his metal box. “Experimental portable sonar. Something soft is moving around in there.” He brightened. “And hey, I don’t think I liquefied anything important inside.”

“Was that a risk?” Peggy asked coolly.

Howard gave an eloquent shrug.

Peggy shook her head. Bucky had never had much of a temper, but when it finally went off, the results were always spectacular. 

_It takes half a dozen missions before Sergeant Barnes snaps. Half a dozen moments where Captain America throws himself headlong into battle without a thought for his own safety. Half a dozen yelps of, “Steve,_ no! _”, followed by furious Brooklyn swearing and the crack of a Springfield rifle. It’s gotten to the point where Peggy and the Commandos find a kind of comfortable rhythm in the relationship between their captain and his sergeant._

_And then James Barnes explodes._

_“You stupid son of a bitch!” he bellows at Steve as soon as he’s within range, and comes flying down the slope from his nest, rifle gripped securely in his white-knuckled right hand. The super-soldier is slogging up out of a valley containing the smoking ruin of a Hydra base, grinning like he’s won a prize, and he never sees it coming._

_Falsworth and Jones do. They dodge out of Barnes’ way a half-instant before he lunges._

_Peggy, bringing up the rear with a pack full of stolen files, has heard most of Steve’s stories of Bucky’s prowess in a fight, but she can see Steve’s entire body go rigid with surprise as Barnes surges forward like a striking snake and lands a furious left hook on Captain America’s jaw. It’s something she’ll tell her grandchildren someday, if she has them: the sight of Bucky Barnes actually_ levitating _in his rage as he slams his fist into the face of his best friend._

_Steve goes down like a sack of flour._

_Barnes is snarling in a language that definitely isn’t English and quite possibly isn’t human, so it’s up to Dum-Dum Dugan to grab him by his arms and lift him bodily off the sprawled figure in the mud. Barnes kicks and curses, but Dugan didn’t spend years as a circus strongman for nothing, and he’s got a good five inches on the compact sergeant, so he simply holds Barnes up in the air and waits for him to stop struggling. Eventually, he does, and hangs in Dugan’s grip like a disgruntled puppy._

_Steve picks himself up out of the muck, rubbing at his jaw. Barnes glares daggers at him the whole time._

_“I’m pretty sure that’s insubordination,” Steve says calmly._

_“Go to hell,” Barnes growls._

_“C’mon, Buck, you don’t mean that.”_

_“Go. To._ Hell. _”_

_“You really wanna do this out here in front of God and everybody?”_

_“Pal, you can ship me back to Brooklyn and I’ll drag you with me and do it in front of half’a Red Hook.” Barnes’ chin juts defiantly into the air, higher than Steve’s for once._

_Steve sighs, and there’s more worry than exasperation in it. “Corporal Dugan, please escort Sergeant Barnes to my quarters.”_

_They hump it over the ridge to their camp._

_Once they arrive, Peggy waits a solid two minutes before finding an excuse to stroll past Steve’s tent._

_“—can’t keep doing this, Buck. The Army has_ rules _.”_

_“Yeah? How many of those did you break gettin’ in here?”_

_“C’mon, don’t be like that. Listen—”_

_“No,_ you _listen for once! I told you before, Steve, I’ll follow you anywhere you wanna go, but you do_ not _get to abuse the privilege! You aren’t bulletproof, you aren’t fireproof, and you can’t keep making me—”_

_There’s a long silence. Peggy has to be careful about her breathing, even as she hears Barnes rasping in pain._

_“Can’t keep making you what, Buck?” Steve’s voice is soft._

_There’s a low huff._

_“Come on,” Steve coaxes._

_Barnes growls. “How many times’ve you had last rites?” he spits._

_“Four,” Steve says coolly._

_“And who was with you every time?”_

_“You were.”_

_“Yeah.” Barnes’ voice trembles just a little. “Four times, I had to watch ’em put the oil on your forehead and pour the wine down your throat. Four times. And I never went outta the room, not once. I slugged Father Hannigan that one time, you remember, when he tried to make me leave?”_

_“You said you didn’t connect.”_

_“I lied. I punched a priest for you, Steve. So I could watch. So you wouldn’t be alone.”_

_“Okay. What’s your point?”_

_“How many more times are you gonna make me watch?”_

_There is the sound of a cautious footstep, then another. A quick rustle, as if someone has jerked back. Then the slow slide of cloth on cloth, and the sound of a sob, muffled by fabric and muscle._

_“I’m sorry, Buck,” Steve whispers. “I’m so goddamn sorry.”_

_“Don’t make me watch,” Bucky sobs. “Don’t make me watch you fall.”_

_“I won’t.”_

_“Because I’ll fall with you.”_

_“I know, Buck.”_

_Peggy slips away, and later, when Steve shows up with a fading shiner and suspiciously red eyes, she pretends she knows nothing._

The phone rang. Everyone flinched, even Steve. Peggy moved first to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“I just want you to know,” Sousa said brightly, “that I am gonna be up to my eyeballs in transport forms until the day I retire. I dunno what you’re up to, but you picked a hell of a time for a vacation.”

“Did you call just to complain about paperwork?” Peggy asked.

“’Course not. I called to share a delicious irony. Are you sitting down?” 

Peggy rolled her eyes and dropped into the chair beside the phone, squinting against the afternoon glare from a window at the end of the hallway. “I am now.”

“Your dead soldier’s next of kin? She works downstairs.”

“What?” Peggy was on her feet again in a heartbeat. 

Sousa chuckled. “There’s a Rebecca Barnes working for the _actual_ phone company. I did some checking, and she lost a brother in the war. Her home address matches the one he gave the Army. You want me to go down and charm her for you?”

A momentary pang of jealousy stabbed Peggy between the ribs, immediately followed by guilt. “Er, no, thank you. But, erm—” she scrabbled for an idea “—those transport reports. Do you suppose you could, ah, liberate a few?”

“I’m the only guy checking ’em,” Sousa said dryly. “I think I can arrange something.”

“Fantastic. Bring them over here as soon as you’re off.”

“I can leave now—”

“No, that will arouse suspicion.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then Sousa said, “This is serious, isn’t it?”

“What tipped you off?” Peggy asked wearily. “The dead bodies, or the mutilations?”

“Actually, it was the _you not being here_. Nothing small gets you to leave your post for long. You don’t have to do this alone, Peggy.”

She looked at the miserable ball of Steve’s ghost, still hunched against the wall beside her bedroom door. “What if I do?” she asked quietly. “What if that’s the only way it can be done?”

“You really believe that?” 

There was hurt in his voice, and more than a little longing. Peggy closed her eyes. She knew she was being cruel to Daniel Sousa, on several levels. The man wore his heart on his sleeve, just as Steve always had, and it had been obvious from the start that he was interested in her. And damn the man for the detective he was, he’d found her weakness.

It had always been easy for her to walk away from a man who danced with her, told her pretty things, gave her gifts. If she’d wanted that, _really_ wanted it, she’d have stayed with Fred all those years ago. Michael had known better, and eventually she’d known it too.

She had no room in her heart, or her life, for men who did what all the other men did. She had only enough room for people who fought at her side—for Steve, for Bucky, for Angie and Rose and Anna and Howard and all the others. People who _did_ things. And now Daniel was stepping up to join those ranks. 

Did she have room for him?

“I don’t know,” she said softly, and it was an answer to two questions at once.

There was a long silence on the line.

“I’ll bring the reports over tonight,” Sousa said. 

“I think that’s wise.”

They hung up and Peggy took a deep, silent breath.

Then she felt eyes on her.

She looked up. Steve had raised his head from his arms and was watching her from down the hall. It wasn’t the daft, lovestruck stare he’d always worn when he’d thought she wasn’t looking. It looked more like the face he’d always pointed at Bucky’s back.

Worry. He was worried for her. 

“I’m all right,” she assured him. “Just a little trouble at work.”

Steve didn’t look reassured. 

Peggy gave her bedroom door a sidelong glance. “Darling,” she said, “would you mind coming with me for a while? I think I could use some moral support.”

Steve smiled.

*

Peggy had never been down to the main exchanges, the ones on the lower floors of the SSR building where people tended to assume she actually worked. They weren’t like Rose’s room, with its two meager lines of operators running the SSR’s private traffic. These rooms were hives, huge and busy and alive with the murmur of female voices.

Except, as she walked in with the ghost of Steve Rogers trailing behind her, one voice definitely _wasn’t_ murmuring. 

“And what you will _find_ , Mister Connolly, if you care to _examine_ page 43 of the policy handbook, is that New York law _requires_ that regular employees working six hours or more per shift be given _no less_ than two fifteen-minute breaks for rest and thirty minutes for a meal _per six hours_ , and I’m _sure_ you wouldn’t want to get the company in trouble with the _state_ , of _course_ not, it’s merely some _oversight_ on someone’s part—”

“Awright, awright!” The second voice was a rough growl. Peggy followed it to find a bearlike man, about fifty years old, jowly and with a receding hairline to match his five o’clock shadow, glaring down at one of his operators. The girl in question didn’t look up to the challenge, really—smaller and thinner than Peggy herself, her brown shoulder-length curls springing slightly out of her careful coif in a way that suggested the hairstyle was the product of heredity rather than rollers. She wore a shabby but well-tailored fawn suit, and she looked fragile, held together with bobby pins and hope. One swipe of the man’s paw, and the girl would likely break something. 

But her spine was ramrod-straight, and even from behind there was something achingly familiar about her. Next to Peggy, Steve chuckled under his breath. It was all the identification anybody would ever need.

“Awright,” the big man repeated. “You made your point, sweetheart. You’ll get your friggin’ breaks to powder your nose.”

“Thank you.” The girl tilted her head, and whatever she’d done with her face made the man scowl harder. She turned away, and before Peggy could get a good look at the front of her, the man reached down behind her and—

_Crunch._

“Oh, _dear_ ,” the girl said, singsong, as her heel came down on the man’s instep and the color drained from his face. “Clumsy _me_. Are you all _right_?” She turned, her skirt swishing around her knees, but not so fast that Peggy couldn’t see a fresh smudge of grime right over the girl’s arse. 

The man growled. The girl made an embarrassed little curtsying motion and moved away, headed for a distant bank of switchboards. And Peggy got her first clear look at the young woman’s face.

Large blue eyes, a little greener than expected but shifting color in the light in that familiar way. Straight nose, full mouth, sharp cheekbones just beginning to emerge from the softness of adolescence. 

And the smirk. The smirk _had_ to be a family trait. 

Steve was grinning openly. Peggy wondered if he’d taught the girl how to handle bullies. Probably not, she decided. She hadn’t gotten hit once. 

“Rebecca Barnes?” Peggy asked as the girl passed by. 

The girl stopped and arched an eyebrow. “Can I help you?” she asked in a voice that should have been saying _Who wants ta know?_

Peggy smiled her professional smile. “I’m Miss Carter, from upstairs.”

The hubbub in the room died down. Nobody at the phone company knew precisely what _upstairs_ did, but they knew it was important, and secret.

“I’m afraid I require your assistance,” Peggy continued. “That is, if your manager can spare you for the afternoon?” She glanced at the still-grimacing man with the stubble.

He immediately pasted on a fake smile. “Whatever you need, ma’am,” he said, with what was probably every bit of grace his mother had taught him.

“Splendid,” Peggy said, and smiled at Becca. “Get your coat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ladies and gentlement, Hurricane Becca has made landfall.
> 
> Next time: Becca pulls out the big guns, Peggy and Sousa put their heads (and maybe their hearts) together, Bucky has a bad day, and Angie has a worse one. Also, dancing. :)
> 
> Come be my friend on Tumblr and Instagram, where I am onethingconstant and I fight PTSD and fascism (well, one particular fascist) with sarcasm and my loyal companion, Bucky Bear.


End file.
